eLearning Slam

Making your courses a resource, not just a one time event.

2010-02-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

I had a question on creating an environment for informal learning or as I like to say; making your courses a resource, not just a one time event.

Of course, there will always be informal learning that is beyond the
reach of computers, so tracking outside computers would be out of the
question. We should start by limiting the discussion to informal
learning done on a computer (or other internet-access device). In order
for the learning to be tracked, we either need to make content that
reports itself, or we have to monitor the end-user's computer (and then
try to determine if a visit to a search engine constitutes learning).
With courses that can report themselves and be tracked, there is plenty
of room for "informal learning", but the developer community has been
slow to evolve to this stage. Some definitions of "Rapid eLearning"
(where Rapid also has to do with how quickly the learner acquires the
knowledge) would overlap informal learning, except that the
implementation steps have been to frightening for a lot of the developer
community. That is, if you need to buy/install/configure an LMS, and
then learn a development tool and how to deploy a plug-in-based course
(with all the security issues associated), you are no longer in the
mood to do any "informal" development.

Next, the structure of AICC/SCORM encourages a very formal style of
training. Explanation: Suppose you have taken a course and remember that
there is a good nugget of information somewhere in the middle. When you
want to go back to that nugget ("just-in-time training") you have to go
through a login screen, a message of the day screen, a list of your
courses, a list of the chapters (because the course has been broken down
into multiple units so that they could track how you did on each
chapter's test), and the finally you get to the content you wanted.
Anyway, (where was I?) by now you've forgotten why you came there in the
first place. If you do remember about the nugget, you go and find it,
but then when you leave the course, your score has been changed because
you didn't complete the test. Your "informal" session just became
"formal" and your training transcript has been altered.
- With AICC/SCORM, one could do informal training, but most LMSs I have
worked with follow the above "formal" concepts.

If we want informal training to be tracked and be used more, here would
be my suggestions:
1. Content should be accessible through a search engine (that does not
require burdensome login)
2. Content should be structured for multi-tiered/web navigation (e.g. No
linear/PowerPoint content with narration or time requirements before
going to the next page)
3. Tracking should be unobtrusive and cumulative. That is, if I take a
test 5 times, all my scores should be tracked, but my training record
should be based on my best score.
4. Any navigation tracking (e.g. pages visited) should be cumulative and
used for information only (not evaluation)
5. All content should be accessible in 3 clicks or less.

If the above concepts are followed when course content is implemented,
they can then be used for both formal and informal training.

Vendor Disclosure: I work for ReadyGo, Inc., an authoring and tracking
tool vendor. Many of our customers have discovered that their content,
when designed as above, is re-used by the learners for "just-in-time"
training. They have gotten past the concept that training (like
PowerPoint presentation) is a one-time event. When a learner needs the
information, they can get to it quickly through a search engine without
needing to log back in.

CHALLENGE: How do you develop courses when you have a bandwidth limitation?

2010-01-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

When bandwidth is limited or screen real estate is limited (eg. old computer, mobile phone), the best approach is to go back to basic HTML & JavaScript. These are the underlying technologies that make the web work. Most training can be done without relying on Flash, Silverlight, Video, or other plug-in based multimedia content. However, for those users who do have good connections and reasonable screen real estate, you can still offer the higher bandwidth content.
If you're looking for authoring tools to help you along, you should consider tools that output content as basic web pages. The ReadyGo Web Course Builder is one such product. The underlying files can easily be delivered with low bandwith (e.g. 9600 baud connection), but if you want to include Flash, Video, Audio, etc. these can easily be incorporated into the content at the course author's discretion.

My latest rant on XML training

2009-09-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

I recently spoke to a customer who wants everything to be XML so that they can re-use it. Regarding this rationale, it seems like the old proverb, "For someone who has a hammer, everything looks like a nail." So, I figure someone at that company knows XML (and they are the only person who knows it, therefore they want job security), and they want to require everything to be in a format they (and only they) can re-exploit. The purpose of XML is precisely to get away from this single format-based mentality. But some people are using XML to enforce a single format requirement.

From a technical perspective, yes, ReadyGo can produce output in XHTML that validates. The only reason ReadyGo decided to support XHTML is that Firefox 3.5 now supports MathML - so there is a compelling reason for XHTML. Before MathML was available, I could not find a good reason to produce XHTML (or XML) other than to satisfy the narrow requirement that "it must be XML".

I guess my rant is on IT departments that create requirements that meet no business or technical needs.

Tracking video's

2009-07-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

One question that should be asked is what or why the videos need to be tracked. If you are looking to simply deliver the videos so that they can be viewed, a SCORM or AICC wrapper is not necessary. If, however, the course creator is interested in tracking who has viewed the content (or simply who has launched it), or, better, how much people understood from the content, then a SCORM or AICC will be useful. One suggestion with video is that the video segments be broken up in to portions that are between around two minutes long. We have done studies and have found that people will remember 10 two minute videos better then one 20 minute video. A good way to reinforce video is to ask a test question at the end of each two minute video. The ReadyGo Web Course Builder ($499/developer) can be used to assemble the videos so that they can be tracked by SCORM.

My thoughts on course size

2009-06-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

When creating web courses the content should be chunked into the smallest coherent units that still make sense based on the content, rather than on the clock. When users are doing self-paced training, they will be easily distracted. Creating a "6 hour" or a "3 hour" or even a "1 hour" module means that the users will have to chain themselves to the content for that time period and avoid any interruption. I doubt that they will be able to do that. Instead, content should be structured as little "pills" of knowledge that can be swallowed quickly or slowly, as the end-user wishes to do. One good option is to have a summary page with links to various presentations of the same material, and a few test questions on that material. This would constitute one "pill" of information. The user can take this, step away, come back, and proceed to the next "pill".

A level up from this would be the "courselet". A courselet is a small piece of content (perhaps a chapter or small course) that can be taken in a 15-20 minute period (for the typical user). If the user needs just-in-time training, a 15-20 minute period is about the most that can be expected for an uninterrupted experience.

Any videos or sound files should be kept 2 minutes or shorter. Otherwise, because watching a video or listening to audio are such passive experiences, the learner will focus instead on their e-mail or on playing a computer game while the content is being served to them.

Creating mobile content

2009-06-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

Beyond the change in experience simply because of the size of the screen, it is important to consider that Flash does not yet run on most mobile devices, that creating a "mobile app" for each platform is a very expensive way to approach training, and that connectivity for mobile devices will change over the next few years.

I believe that mobile devices will soon have the "always-on" connectivity that desktop computers currently have. As soon as enough providers start offering flat-rate plans, you'll see all carriers do so, just as nationwide long-distance is now a standard feature of cell phones. How does this affect the employee? It means that the content does not need to be downloaded ahead of time (like an app). The student will be able to take it just as they would with their desktop browser. Then comes the interesting part of how to create the content. If you stick to web standards, the browsers will be able to provide the optimal display for the specific device. Content built as HTML content (as opposed to text-in-pictures or video movies) can be rearranged by the browser to provide maximum display, and minimum scrolling requirements. Many of the new mobile browsers do a pretty good job of supporting style sheets, so there are a lot of layout options that can be applied.
The ReadyGo Web Course Builder ($499/developer) builds content that is based primarily on HTML and style sheets. The tool includes several templates designed for mobile browsers, and provides a preview of how the course looks in the different display sizes. So, the author can load a mobile template, generate and post the course (see how it looks on mobile devices), and then reload a desktop template, generate and post the course to a different web page (see how it looks on desktop machines), and students can now choose if they want to see the mobile version or the desktop version of the course. The tool can also be used to carry out tests and surveys using the mobile platform. Tracking can be done using the ReadyGo Server Side Testing module ($1499/server). The pricing allows unlimited creation and tracking of courses.

Getting the behavior you want, saving the data you need

2009-06-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

Question:
Most LMSs are designed with a specific set of behaviors as imagined by the LMS designers. Similarly, the course content may produce behaviors beyond those expected by the LMS. How do I change behaviors in ReadyGo WCB?

Answer:
That is why we have LMS-packs. By using different LMS-packs you can change the course’s behaviors. Hopefully, one or several of the LMS-packs will give the course the desired behavior when it is served from the LMS.

Question:
What if I have a customer who needs specific reporting and my LMS does not save this information. Do I have any options?

Answer:
One solution ReadyGo developed was for the courses to send information to both the LMS and to ReadyGo SST. If the LMS does not provide the detailed information, SST will store it, and SST reports can provide a history of every time the test was taken with every answer provided by the student. This augments the LMS, so that the LMS can concentrate on its portal functions rather than on the tracking functions.

How LMS's work?

2009-06-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of a dialog I had with one of our customers. They asked a lot of thought provoking questions. I have not seen this type of dialog any place and thought others would be interested. I am familiar with over 60 LMS's since I have written LMS packs to work with them.

Question:
Do most LMS record only the first or best score but not all sessions of a student

Answer:
This is what I have seen.

Question
Some LMS say they are Scorm compliant but that is only true when their own authoring tool is used

Answer: Generally False. There are just a few that claim SCORM, but really are not.

Question:
Is an authoring tool responsible to provide different SCORM behaviors?

Answer: In theory, this in True; in practice this is false. I have only once seen an LMS that adapted their code when a problem was pointed out to them. Most LMS vendors fault the authoring tool using the reasoning, “no other authoring tool courses have this problem” or “we have hundreds of courses that work – the problem must be in your course”. For example ReadyGo worked with a course creation company that was selling their courses via one of the "big" named LMS's. ReadyGo had not had any success reporting test results to this LMS. The LMS told me that it must be our tool. I contacted the CTO of the course creation company. He told me that their courses did not have tests. This shows how empty the term “compliant” can be

Question:
Does the scorm model believes that a course has one final test and only one final grade.

Answer: True – but this is more a function of the course authors. The specification does not explicitly say so, but it has become the most common implementation.

Question: In scorm a student views a course once and never returns to reference the material?

Answer: True, although this is more an assumed LMS/author behavior. SCORM 2004 actually is set up so that a student can see a particular SCO multiple times in one “course”.

What is the minimum requierment of SCORM?

2009-06-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

A few SCORM Questions:
You describe the other tools as rather weak when it comes to real Scorm support, in the real world they seem to be able to produce Scorm-compliant courses as promised. Is this because the minimum requirement/the minimum of information wanted by most organizations is low?

Answer:
If you only have one interface for SCORM, then that is all the course author has access to. By doing less, you can avoid supporting the customer, and can simply push the course author to ask the other vendor (LMS vendor or authoring tool vendor) to make up for the behavior that you would like. Most authoring tools and LMSs only support the lowest common denominator required to claim SCORM or AICC compliance/conformance. If you do this, you can create your sales/marketing material, and the customers will not look beyond this. As you are seeing, many of the issues become difficult to visualize unless you have experience in the field. For a large number of trainers, producing anything beyond PowerPoint is either too difficult or just not of interest. So imagine trying to ask a course author whether they want to set the lesson status based on number of times a test has been taken. For the vendor support department, the best approach is to simply provide one interface behavior. If the customer wants more, they can take the 6 week course on programming in Flash. This will repel most course authors, and simultaneously will minimize support costs. Unfortunately, it also discourages the learners because their experiences are bland.

Question:
Do authoring tools other then ReadyGo have LMS packs? How do other tools fulfill the different needs of the customer?

Answer: Yes, ReadyGo is the only tool with LMS packs and behaviors. This is because the other tools believe that their customers don’t have needs beyond the single behavior. They think the only reasonable score is a value between 0 and 100? (With SCORM 2004, the score is now required to be between -1.0 and +1.0.) They think the only reasonable behavior is to have a student pass one test at the end of a course? Other common assumptions are: Why should a student ever come back to a course once they have completed it? Shouldn’t there only be one test question per page of content?

Question:
What is the minimum to achieve scorm-compliant certification?

Answer:
Call LMSInitialize() and LMSFinish()
Two fields, one tells the LMS the course has been started, the other tells the LMS the course is complete.

Question:
What is the difference between AICC-compatibility and Scorm-conformance?

Answer:
There is no real AICC-compatibility certification. You go to an “independent” agency of your choice, and pay money for them to write something that says you comply with the specification as you have chosen to interpret it. With SCORM there is an official test suite you can use. The test suite is better, but only checks for the minimum requirements (see above).

Saving data in an AICC course

2009-06-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Question:
From an AICC course can a score be saved for each page that has test questions? If so, can you save one score per course, one score per test, or one score per test question? If a student re-takes a test does the first score get stored or overwritten?

Answer:
In theory, a score can be stored for each question. To do this we will need to make each page of questions a unit/SCO. That way you can store a score for each page of questions. Alternatively, within the course, we could define an objective that is a composite score for several questions. Once again, I haven’t seen an AICC-based LMS that would store/report the objectives and interactions, so this is a moot point. Generally, I only see one score per unit. So, if you want more granularity, you have to break your content up into one question=one unit. When you throw in the delays for launching units, this becomes instructionally painful for the student. (Most LMS's take 8 to 20 seconds to store a unit and launch the next unit) If a student retakes a test, it is up to the LMS to decide what to do. My preference, as you see with ReadyGo SST, is to append the result to the report. However, most LMSs only report a single score, so they will tend to overwrite results from previous sessions. I have never seen an LMS that will store more than one score for a single student session. So, the student could take the test 15 times until they pass, and only the final score is reported (without recording that the student took the test 15 times.) Of course, the course itself could also track how many times the student took the test, but there is no way to report this except in the “suspend_data”, which the LMS does not view since there is no standard for it. SCORM 2004 addresses this, but for it to work, the LMS has to relaunch the unit each time the student wants to retake the test.

LMS/SCORM Complete status

2009-06-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

Question:
If the LMS manager and the LMS provider are clear that the status “complete” shall appear when for example the student took a test and passed. Why is this still so complicated to implement that? Is this a problem of the SCORM definition, or a mismatch of field names?

Answer:
It is all about WHEN the completion status is sent. Some LMSs assume that a SCO contains only one page. Therefore, if the SCO has been completed, the student session is finished, and there is no more to do. However, if the SCO has multiple pages, and after the student completes, they visit other pages, the LMS could decide to stop tracking any further results (I have seen this). Sending a status to the LMS is not hard, but it can be hard to calculate it, especially if it depends on scores or behaviors from previous sessions. Also, there can be timing issues. Typically, one wants to report status type information as the user leaves a page or loads a page. With some LMSs, if the messages arrive too quickly, the LMS drops messages. In the case we were seeing with the AICC Basic IE6+, FF+ for frameless, the reporting problem existed because as each page of content is unloaded, the course reports the time on the page and the current lesson status. When the course gets to the Exit page, it has more to do. When the page loads, it sends the course completion status (putParam/ LMSSetValue). Then, separately, it has to send the ExitAU (equivalent to LMSFinish() and LMSCommit() in SCORM) message. With AICC, these are messages sent directly to the server. You can’t send more than one at a time, so we had to split them into onunload for one page, onload for the exit page, and onclick for the exit page. We were possibly seeing a timing issue that the onunload from the previous page and the onload for the exit page were arriving too soon (or in the wrong order) at the server. The onclick for the exit button wouldn’t be such a problem since the user will take at least 0.5seconds before they click it.

Another big issue is what to do when the user “exits” the course. This can either occur with an explicit “exit” button or if the user closes their browser. Many authors don’t want the exit button, and many users simply won’t use it. Therefore, if the user clicks “X” to close their browser window/tab, the course must send the exit messages. This can get difficult. So there needs to be an overall onunload for the course/frameset. Some newer browsers are preventing sending of messages directly to servers when pages unload because of security. Also, how does one send two or 3 messages simultaneously as the browser is shutting down?

Aside from the theoretical issues, there are some simple practical ones. When the course is built, it needs to be tested in the delivery environment. We often find problems in sequences we didn’t expect the student to follow – they start the course, jump to the end, jump to a test, exit, come back… With the AICC course we were working with there was an additional issue that it seems that the browser behavior changed over time. We saw that the onunload message from the prior page was arriving at the LMS after the onload from the final page. So, the onload message set the status to complete, but this was overwritten when the previous page’s onunload message arrived. We did expect the messages from the previous page to arrive after the message from the current page.

2009-06-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

Here is another great question I got. This is a continuation of my last blog.

If someone, like the E-Learning Manager at a company, would make up his mind that for a group of courses the "completion" of a test is given when All tests are taken and for another group of course when 1 test is taken-- then two different behaviors need to be programmed into the course. The LMS would need to work differently. Can the e-Learning manager define all sorts of behaviors? How do you know if the LMS can do this? Can the course deliver the data the way I need to?

Answer:
This is a difficult issue. Keep in mind that we have to program for any LMS. This would mean even the most minimal LMS. Therefore, the course itself has to handle all the logic. With SCORM 2004, the navigation between SCOs and the calculation of course completion can be assigned to the LMS. In SCORM 1.2, the concept of course completion did not exist – only lesson completion did. So, from this point of view, it is best to think of the LMS as a data storage device only.

When approaching people who have this question, it is best to have a series of examples of what behaviors are available. Then, based on the customer preferences, it is necessary to choose or create the LMS-pack based on what they want. Some examples:
Course completion: Take final test; pass final test; visit certain pages in course; total score across tests above 70%; pass every test with 70%; pass certain tests with 70%; be on course for a certain amount of time; or a combination of these.
Lesson status on restart: If course was previously completed, don’t change status; restart with incomplete every time; send pass/fail instead of complete/incomplete; if course has tests, send pass/fail. If it has no tests, send complete/incomplete; Hide some tests if the student is not taking the course for credit.

Currently ReadyGo provides multiple packs. The course creator then chooses the pack that meets their needs. This way we can trick an LMS to provide more behaviors then they were designed for.

ReadyGo's philosophy on course progress

2009-06-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

Question:
What is ReadyGo's philosophy on course progress?

Answer:
Our philosophy is that the course is reporting both a score and a completion status. These should be handled independently of each other. However, a large number of customers want score>90% = completion. So, you’re throwing away one of the very few reported data available. Each LMS-pack has a different philosophy. Some tie the completion to the score; some do completion when the student reaches the exit page; some do completion based on visiting a certain number of pages. This way course creators can choose a pack that meets their needs.

Can my authoring tool support more then one behavior?

2009-06-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Question:
How can I verify that my authoring tool supports more than one behavior?

Answer:
Most authoring tools simply have 1 SCORM behaviour and 1 AICC behaviour. If the author wants a different behaviour, they have to break the courses down to page=SCO. Then, they can pay for the programming effort. In ReadyGo WCB, all the behavior is programmed through JavaScript. Each LMS interface has a file that lists the component pieces used for it during course generation. There are components for the "index.htm" page, for the main/first page, for the bullet pages, for the test pages, for the sidebar, for the services/menu bar, and for the exit page. These different pages play their own role in the lifecycle of a course. The listing is in a .des file. The contents of the .des file are described in a file called “desfile.txt” in the LMS folder. The .des file contains the names of the files that are used in the different places throughout a course (e.g. when a test loads, within the index page, etc.) There is a file called "descriptions.txt" in the "lms" folder that contains a summary of every LMS pack.

What does a SCORM LMS actually do?

2009-06-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

I was just asked some great questions on how LMS's actually work with a course. I thought others may be interested in this conversation:

Question:
I have worked with a number of LMS's. Why is it that all the work is done on the course side? The LMS must do something so that the course can send data. What does the course do, what does the LMS do? Is the LMS the data receiver and then processes the data in a given way (how flexible?. Does the LMS create the reports?
The course sends the data. I need an example here for example the status complete:
Does an LMS has a datafield that is set to “completed – not completed” depending on what the course sends? How many datafields are there for a course to be “SCORM”-compatible? Which fields? What does an LMS need to do to be SCORM-compatible?
Start a course, notice the exit, write a status, store the test results ----?

Answer:
For most LMSs, what the LMS has to provide is a User ID when they launch the course, the “suspend_data” (2048 characters that the course set the previous time it was taken), the user name, the previous time on course, and a few other “core” fields. That is what is provided with a good SCORM course. There is no logic that the LMS is supposed to perform (with SCORM 1.2 and earlier): An LMS only provides data storage and retrieval. With AICC, since the course couldn’t really get to the content sent by the LMS, the requirement for data retrieval was minimal.

For SCORM 1.2, conformance, all that a course needs to do is send LMSInitialize and LMSFinish. This would make a course SCORM “conformant”. That is why you will see tools out there that can turn a Word document into a SCORM conformant “course”. Of course, instructionally this has no value except to track that someone has taken the course. A simple web statistics tracker could tell you that (you can see what users based on their IP address have seen what pages of content.)

For an LMS, to be SCORM 1.2 conformant, they must handle LMSInitialize(), LMSCommit(), LMSSetValue(), LMSGetValue(), and LMSFinish(). The important work is set by LMSSetValue, which specifies the variable name and the value. To be 1.2 conformant, there are 10 “core” values that must me supported. Most 1.2 LMSs have traditionally only supported about 5 of these (student_id, student_name, lesson_location, credit, lesson_status, entry, score, total_time, exit, session_time). There are some other groups of values called “objectives” and “interactions” where a course author could put in the score for individual questions. In SCORM 2004, support for these is required. The ReadyGo courses have used these in SCORM 1.2, but there are only a handful of LMSs that have tracked them and even fewer that have been able to report on them.

For continuity of behavior from one session to another, therefore, the course generally has to put the data it might need into the “suspend_data” field, and then it can parse it when it loads. With the better LMSs, the course could ask for a listing of the objectives and interactions that were previously provided along with previous lesson status and score. The difficulty is if you have 20 questions in 4 tests within one SCO (unit). It is hard to retrieve this type of detail from most LMSs since they only support the “core” set. So, with WCB, we use the suspend_data field to store/retrieve previous scores that have been set by the course. Then, in terms of logic for certificate generation, the course has to take care of it.

Because of the difficulties in retrieving data, there is a perception that a SCO should be designed to only have one question in it. That is why you will see many authoring tools that set up every test question, and usually every page of content to be a separate SCO. The golden rule with SCORM is that one SCO cannot send the user to another SCO, so this means that after each SCO (or “page” in most cases), the course has to exit from the LMS, and the LMS has to launch the next SCO. In some cases, this can take a noticeable time since the LMS has to retrieve the user’s previous data and package it so that it can be obtained by the SCO. In a good LMS, this may be a lot of data. So the end user suffers a delay between each SCO. If the SCO is designed as a chapter or an entire course, the delay will not be noticeable. However, if each page is a SCO, the course-taking experience could be painful.

What works when creating Web-Based Training

2009-05-26T09:43:00.000-07:00

When creating Web-Based Training, the best approach is to look at what works best on the Web. I am a fan of allowing the student to navigate anywhere in the course with just 3 clicks. This means providing navigation menus at all times, with access at least to all the start-of-chapter pages or to a course-wide table-of-contents. What is so powerful about web pages is that they give easy access to whatever content you want to allow. If you give the student control over their navigation, they can adapt the training to their immediate needs.

The biggest frustration I have heard (and experienced) is from not having control over my time when I am doing "self-paced" training. That is, if I have to visit every page, wait for the narration to complete, and/or follow the course author's idea of how they'd like me to go through the content, I get very frustrated, and tune out of the course. If the course allows me to quickly find the areas where I need more information and allows me to take the necessary tests for certification, I enjoy the course much more. Beyond that, I don't expect to retain 100% of the content in the course. But I can bookmark the course. So, if I can get back to the content for a just-in-time refresher, the course will be really useful to me.

A good authoring tool will make it trivial for you to include the necessary navigation (without having to manually add it on every page). If done properly, it will be unobtrusive, but very useful. Beyond that, number every page with an outline number (chapter number.page number) and or a location number (page x of y).

Including Surveys with Courses

2009-03-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

The most difficult part of online surveys is that they are so optional. If the survey is part of a required course, response rates can be raised as long as the end-users know that their survey responses are also required, and that there will be consequences of not answering (or rewards for answering).

One trick to get assessment data from courses with tests is to mix the survey questions in with the required test page(s). That is, if some of the questions on a test are survey questions (there is no "correct" answer), but the other questions are graded, there will be a significantly higher response rate to those questions. If your test/survey software only provides one question at a time, this feature can be bypassed by the end-users. Software like the ReadyGo Server Side Testing module can track pages with combinations of test and survey questions, and therefore get higher response rates.

Another trick is to make survey responses a requirement to be able to take the final exam in a required course. Incentives such as a raffle for survey participants provide a more positive form of invitation to take the survey.

Assuring security when giving tests

2009-03-12T21:07:00.000-07:00

The requirements of online testing and absolute security/verification are generally incompatible. As noted, the user and their assistant simply need to be at the terminal at the same time in order to cheat the system. If absolute verification that the individual is responsible for every answer is required, the only guaranteed solution is proctored testing with periodic checks using a government issued photo-identification card.
If the user is trying to cheat the on-line system, there are many ways they can bypass all the security measures proposed by the various vendors:
1. The registered user and their assistant can both be at the terminal/computer taking the test. Any biometric or password-based verification can be completed by the real user, while at the same time their assistant provides them the answers.
2. The registered user can share their password with their assistant, and thus any password-based system can be fooled.
3. A camera taking pictures of the end-user's environment will not pick up the blue-tooth headset through which they are being fed the answers.

Instead of trying to increase security, the approaches we have found to work well include:
1. Give the required questions multiple times throughout the course rather than just at the end. For example, after a page in the middle of a chapter, give a short quiz with the required question. Feed the answer to the student if they got it wrong. At the end of the chapter, repeat the question. Finally, in the final exam, give the question. Make all tests required, but only the last one counts. If, by the third attempt, the user doesn't answer correctly, you have a bigger problem with that employee, and alternative remediation will be necessary.
2. Require the user/employee to sign and send in an affidavit that their responses were their own work. This provides legal/regulatory compliance that the organization has done their due diligence.

Most end-users (especially those who cheat) will opt for the easier alternative. If the tests are comprehensive, but easier (and less annoying) than the effort to cheat, they will generally choose to just take the test. We have seen that a 45 minute PowerPoint presentation followed by a required test is a really bad way to present content. Users walk away until the automated part is finished, and then come back to just take the test. Instead, make it so that the user can navigate anywhere in the course. If they fail an exam, send them back to the content so that they have to pass the material.

If you make a reasonable effort, you should be able to satisfy the regulatory requirements. If requirements cannot be met this way, consider proctored examinations in a controlled environment.

ReadyGo's web site

2009-02-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

We just updated our web site. You should take a look. We used ReadyGo WCB/ReadyGo Mobile to create the site. The benefit of using ReadyGo's tools is that the site is ADA/508 and W3C compliant for blind readers and works on all the mobile devices that have a browser. The new look of the site also shows what you can do with ReadyGo's templates.

Visit the site at: http://www.readygo.com

What I think about Avitars

2008-11-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

I just got an e-mail from a long time customer asking me what I think about an article they read on Avitars. My response is:

Please forgive my cynicism ... but an article about how wonderful Avatars are that is written by the CEO of a company that makes Avatars seems somewhat self-serving. Also, note that "developers" like this. Where does it talk about whether the audience likes it? The stuff about the MTV-generation being different, in my opinion, is recycled. Yes, younger people are more familiar with texting, social networks, and faster multi-tasking, but this (my opinion) is because they are at a stage where they have more free time. (Remember when our parents complained about how much TV we watched instead of going outside and tending to the vegetable garden?) Once they get older, and get busier (like most employees at work are), they have less time for games, distractions, and other entertainment. Unfortunately, what matters is making the content interesting, and above all accessible. I don't expect people to learn (really understand and develop their own ramifications from) web-based content the first time they read it. What makes web-based content useful is that they can get to it on an as-needed basis. Avatars and recorded video, from our anectodal experience (hearing from our customers) do the following:
1. Slow down the learning - the user has to wait for the audio track to get to the content. Imagine if Google was audio based rather than text-based. How long would it take you to find what you're looking for?
2. Reduce the need for the person to process the information through the brain. If someone reads to me, I don't have to read. I find that the best way for me to learn something is to rewrite it. If I just am listening, I can drift away (check my inbox, play free-cell, etc.)
3. Distracts the co-workers in cubicles around them. When the course loads, suddenly the audio kicks off. Everyone hears it and is distracted.
4. Provide visual stimulation, but not critical thinking development or fact transfer.

My belief is that in the MTV generation, unless people are couch-potato-ing (watching music videos), what they want is faster, smaller chunks of info. When you start transmitting to PDAs, and it takes 5 minutes for the audio track that lasts one minute to download, you may find a loss of effectiveness.

Understanding the Differences between Mobile Platforms

2008-11-13T12:20:00.000-08:00

A study done in 2007 on mobile platform usage found that Symbian (used in Nokia phones) had 70% of the mobile OS market. Linux (used by multiple vendors such as Sharp and Samsung) had 15% of the mobile OS market. Research In Motion's Blackberry had 5% of the mobile OS market, while Microsoft Windows Mobile and CE (used by Palm, Compaq, Samsung) had 5%. Since this study came out, new players including Apple (iPhone) and Android (Google's operating system) have been introduced. In many countries outside of the US, cell phones are used 100 times as often as desktop computers.

The window size in different mobile browsers can vary from 320x160 to 600x480, or even landscape mode of 480x600. Beyond the screen size, there are different levels of support for visual elements such as styles, dynamic content (JavaScript), and images. I predict that over the next few years more mobile devices will support multi-media. The question will be if they will support the same multi-media formats you currently have on your desktop computer or if they will develop their own plug-ins. Here is a summary of the features (and limitations) found on mobile systems today:

• Blackberry has a custom mobile browser. Their browser has poor JavaScript support, does not support Flash, supports zooming, but provides no special handling of frames, and ignores style sheets (CSS). This means that content cannot be "hidden" through style sheet control. This is a problem if you wish to provide both textual and graphic links.
• Microsoft has a number of different mobile operating systems. Windows CE is found on devices built prior to 2005. Windows Mobile 6 was released in 2007, and Windows Mobile (Next) is under development. All of these platforms contain browsers that are versions of IE4/IE5/IE6 resulting in many limitations. On Windows Mobile 6, the browser is better, but it is a limited version of IE6. The Microsoft browsers have poor JavaScript support, do not support Flash, do not support zooming, and ignore style sheets (CSS). Windows Mobile 6 supports CSS but does not provide any special handling for frames. (See Minimo for an alternative.)
• Minimo is a port of the Firefox (Mozilla) browser for Windows Mobile devices. The Minimo browser is available for Windows Mobile 5 and later. It is easy to install and fully JavaScript enabled. This means that dynamic content works well. The Minimo browser is capable of performing decent zooming, and has good style sheet (CSS) support. Minimo is one of the best browsers available. The only downside is that it needs to be downloaded and installed on the Windows Mobile platform before usage - but it is free.
• Symbian is the name of Nokia's operating system that includes a browser. The browser is a good browser with reasonable JavaScript support and provides excellent zooming.
• Apple's iPhone uses a proprietary operating system and the Safari browser. iPhone supports multimedia separately from the browser. Overall, this is an excellent platform since it has good screen size, good style sheet (CSS) and JavaScript support, and the touch screen makes it easy to use.
• Palm's operating system is called Garnet. It includes a browser. The Garnet browser has poor style sheet (CSS) support, but it does a nice job with frames by putting them at the bottom of the page. It has weak support for dynamic HTML. Like Apple, Palm’s devices have touch screens to make navigation easier.

Designing mobile eLearning courses

2008-11-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

Before embarking on creation of a mobile accessible course you will want to understand how the learner's experience changes when they view your course through a mobile device. Mobile devices are typically used in a very distraction-filled environment. Learners may be on a bus, on a train, at the store, eating lunch, or at work. The mobile device screen is very small. This limits what the learner can see and can make it difficult to read a large amount of content, view graphics, or see moving graphics.

Course content behaves differently when the display window shrinks. Graphic artists and many course creators like to design eLearning courses so that all aspects of the visual layout are tightly controlled. They like to precisely specify the position of each character. This is called absolute positioning. Absolutely positioned pages work well for printed brochures, but don't work well for environments where the learners have different screen/display sizes. Because the designer has specified positioning for a specific screen size ahead of time, the browser cannot rearrange the content optimally for the end-learner's current screen size. Absolutely positioned content may require horizontal scrolling to read, or may simply be illegible because the font size is too large or too small. Along the same line of thought, many test questions are built with tools that only work on specific browsers. For example, tools assume that the learner uses only Internet Explorer 7 or later or has flash installed. Mobile devices (event those that use Microsoft Windows Mobile) use older, simpler browsers making many web pages and web forms unusable.

Additionally, in a mobile environment your content will be most effective if you only provide a small amount on each page. While learners can scroll horizontally on a mobile device, it may be difficult to follow the content if they have to scroll too much. The rule of thumb, is to provide about twice the amount of content that can be viewed on the screen: If an average mobile screen supports 300 characters, limit your pages to 600 characters. This leads to content that is short, quick, and fast. Mobile devices have different size and capability limitations. Some browsers will resize the fonts, some support zooming, some don't respect style sheets, some have a portrait layout, etc. Avoid multiple columns, since they will require horizontal scrolling.

There are a few simple rules to follow when creating graphics for mobile devices. Avoid placing important text inside graphics. That is, it is possible to put text inside a graphic to serve as a label. The mobile browser may shrink graphics so that they fit on the small display size. Any text that is in the graphic will also be shrunk, potentially to a size that is illegible. On other devices, if the graphic is too large, the visitor will need to scroll horizontally and vertically to see it. This can become frustrating for your learner since horizontal scrolling is annoying and is not supported on all mobile devices. So, graphics should be designed for low resolution screens.

None of the currently available mobile devices support multimedia that is part of web pages. This means that content requiring plug-ins such as Flash, PDF, Java, and most movie formats do not work across the platforms. The movies that are becoming popular on iPod require a proprietary movie application, separate from the browser. This means that rich/multimedia should be avoided.

The overall layout/look-and-feel of your site can also be a challenge. If you plan to use the same content for the desktop and the mobile learners, one option is to have two different style sheets, with the appropriate one loading at run time. In a properly designed site, the style sheet specifies layout, positioning, font sizes/colors, backgrounds, borders, and many other display attributes. It is important to understand that style sheet support is not uniform across mobile devices. Because of the non-uniform support, you might consider creating two separate eLearning courses: one for PC access and one for mobile access. Some basic considerationswhen creating a template for mobile devices:
· Most branding can be done through font and background colors
· Use small or unobtrusive graphics and logos
· Avoid navigation bars that may take up a large percentage of the screen. If you want to include complex navigation, place these at the end of the page content so that learners have access first to the primary content.
· Avoid background graphics.
o The end learners ambient light will vary depending on whether they are indoors or outdoors.
o A background that causes low contrast difference between text and decoration may make content impossible to read.
· Pull-down menus don't necessarily work on mobile devices (because of uneven JavaScript support), so consider using arrows to take learners through a tour of your course.
· Graphic navigation icons should be simple arrows or a descriptive word such as “next” or “back”.
· Navigation frames work well on some devices, but not others. It's best to place them below or after the main content.

When you build your content using recommended web practices it will work effectively on all platforms. Content that follows W3C recommendations including HTML implementation, style sheets, and relative positioning is the most accessible from the largest number of platforms. If you are already using a tool, confirm that it works on all mobile devices. You may need to do your own testing since most vendors have focused on the desktop market.

Also consider the connection speed for your visitor's device. Many mobile devices only have access to low bandwidth services. Your visitor might only have access to download speeds comparable to what most people had in the mid 1990's. Since access speeds vary tremendously, make sure your content can be downloaded quickly.

Tests can work over mobile devices, but they need to be implemented using standard HTML. A big caveat is your LMS. Most LMS's do not work in a mobile environment since they created their environment in tools (AJEX and Rich Media) that do not work on mobile devices

Why Mobile ELearning courses

2008-11-03T14:23:00.000-08:00

Analysts, reporters, and computing futurists believe that mobile applications are the greatest path for growth in the computing industry. Their focus and enthusiasm centers on applications that can be installed natively on the mobile devices, rather than on the use of the mobile device as a communication gateway. For example, many articles feature software that tells you how many of your "friends and acquaintances" are currently within 500 yards of where you are sitting. However, mobile devices may have a role that is much larger than as a platform for handy applications. Mobile devices can provide highly portable, low cost Internet access, thereby opening up huge new information consumer bases.

Many of the mobile applications being featured are productivity tools like scheduling or notification software or entertainment tools like music players and games. In order to run, these applications need to be purchased, downloaded, and installed on the mobile platform. Each mobile platform/operating system requires its own, natively compiled version of the application. The applications need to be redesigned and rebuilt for each target platform (e.g. Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, etc.). While most of the focus on mobile computing has been on specific applications, the most obvious, and potentially most important application has been forgotten: web access.

Most learners are accessing the Internet to take eLearning courses. ELearning courses provide organizations, government, and individuals a training portal to the world where they can provide trainer their learners. An organization's course is accessible to learners through a web browser (e.g Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari), regardless of the operating system (MS-Windows, Mac, etc.) the visitor is using. This access to training is provided without the learner purchasing, downloading, or installing anything since most computers are delivered with a web browser already installed. The same is becoming true for mobile devices.

The need to download or install an application before accessing a course is one of the major reasons that learners abandon a course. In fact, when learners need to install a plug-in in order to view the content, they only do so 10% of the time. This means that the hurdle of installing a plug-in or media viewer is enough to prevent most learners from taking a course.

Most eLearning courses currently work well on a desktop computer with a moderate resolution screen, but work poorly on a mobile device. This is primarily because of design decisions course creators have taken when they built the course. Most course creators assume that learners have the same size/resolution display as what they have on their computer. They only test the course with their computer, at their preferred browser setting. For example most courses only work properly if the display device is at least 700 pixels wide. (Most mobile displays are less than 400 pixels wide). So, to read a line of text, the end-learner will need to scroll horizontally, something very difficult to do on mobile devices that don't have a touch-sensitive screen. Another big reason courses are being designed in unfriendly manners is the rush to Rich Internet Applications. This just means content that requires plug-ins like Adobe Flash or Java in order to display. These applications provide pretty movies, visual stimulation, and responsive content, but add little content value. Currently, most mobile devices (including the iPhone) are unable to play rich media as part of web pages. This means that courses that require plug-ins are inaccessible to mobile consumers.

An even bigger problem exists with tests. Most test questions are built in tools that output flash, are browser specific, or use other rich media formats that are inaccessible to mobile devices The end result are test where a learner is unable to set the focus on an entry box, and typing doesn't work. Tests are also being designed to use the latest instantaneous feedback mechanisms such as AJAX. These technologies are not yet supported on many mobile browsers. So, when a learner wishes to take a test when they are in a mobile environment they can not do so.

If you are building courses, you need to ask some fundamental questions:
- Why are you building these courses?
- Who is your learner?
If you want learners (employees, customers, prospective clients, and partners) to take your courses you will need to ensure that your course works in your learners's environment. With maturity in cell-phone/mobile device technologies, your learners will be moving away from their desks, and will want to learn when they are mobile. This means that courses that have worked nicely until now will needs to be able to handle the changing learning environment.

Currently about 15% of the cell phones in the US have a web browser. Most people exchange their cell phone for the latest model every two years. This is why Internet accessible mobile device adoption is growing exponentially.

Your training strategy need to ensure that you are not repelling learners. If your courses do not work with mobile devices how many learners will you not be accessing in the future? If you require that they download and install an application or plug-in so that they can take a course, how many learners have you lost? The questions you need to ask to see if you should be looking at a mobile training strategy is:
· Are your learners sitting at a desk or are they out and about?
· Do your learners use cell phones or other mobile devices?
· What do they currently read on their mobile devices (nothing, short e-mails, long messages?)
· Do they currently use mobile devices to send e-mail?
· Does their mobile devices have a browser (is it a smartphone)?
· Do they have or are they looking at purchasing a mobile device with a browser?
· Would they want to access training when they are away from their desktop computers?
· Are your courses useful to a mobile audience?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes you should consider expanding your course options to support mobile devices.

Using Audio tracks for your eLearning

2008-09-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

I get frustrated every time I hear about an eLearning course that is little more then a voiced over PowerPoint. Have you ever taken a voiced over Power Point? Can you remember anything that was presented? Remember your learners when you are creating eLearning.

Audio tracks with eLearning is a really weak solution because it:
1. Reduces knowledge retention - students become very passive participants. "If I can wait and have someone read to me, why should I pay attention".
2. Reduces productivity: people read at about 3 times the speed of spoken word. A narrated course will take 3 times as long as a text one. "Why take 15 minutes to do a course when I can take 45?"
3. Reduces accessibility: When you create a narrated course with lots of pictures, random access based on topics of interest becomes harder. You have to wait for the course to get back to the item of interest that you wanted, rather than being able to navigate there in 3 clicks/5 seconds.
4. Removes searchability: Adobe recently announced that they are developing technology so that Flash items would become search-able. Finally, after 10 years of Internet, they're starting to think about how people may use it. Meanwhile, outfits such as yours have been pushing flash based courses (PPT-to-Flash converters) because of the high levels of "interactivity" they provide. That's a joke!
5. If recorded video is such a good product, why don't we just record all the college/university professors one time, and then just play the recordings for the students? Why? because it sucks and nobody will pay attention to some boring video. Putting the boring video on-line doesn't make it any less boring, it just makes it easier to turn off.

delivering content to mobile platforms

2008-08-26T16:05:00.001-07:00

There are two approaches currently to delivering content to mobile platforms:
1. Require that the student download and install an application to their PDA so that courses can be displayed.
2. Rely on the built-in browser for delivery of content, without requiring each student to install additional software on their platform.

Option 1 gives more multimedia delivery capabilities, but limits the platforms that can be supported since a delivery application will be required for each type of platform (e.g. Blackberry, Windows Mobile 5, Windows Mobile 6, Palm, Symbian, iPhone, etc.) This option also has the enormous hurdle of requiring that the student download and install the application before they can even try to access the content.

Option 2 is only now coming into being a possibility because the browsers on these platforms are finally getting mature enough to handle web courses. This option requires the least modification to the end-user's platform, and will therefore result in the greatest success in content delivery.

In terms of course design, the main concern is the size of the end-users screens. Since this size can vary, a design paradigm based more on "web design" rather than "graphic artist design" is necessary. That is, the content should be laid out visually and implemented using the "best of web" ideas, such as allowing the browser to rearrange the content so that it fits the screen to require the minimum amount of horizontal scrolling. Also, the use of multimedia needs to be limited because of bandwidth and delivery/plug-in restrictions. None of the major mobile platforms play Flash yet as part of web pages. Some of the platforms have minimal, or no style sheet support.

The ReadyGo Web Course Builder produces content that can be delivered equally through standard desktop web browsers and through mobile platform browsers. Basic question types such as multiple choice, multiple selection, true/false, text entry, and numerical entry function well on all the major PDA platforms and can be tracked with the Server Side Testing module. Because of limitations in the browser capabilities, we do not recommend trying to deliver SCORM or AICC courses through web browsers. That is, the mobile platform browsers have limited JavaScript engines, so the two-way communication necessary between the course and the LMS will only work well on platforms such as iPhone. Even with these limitations, ReadyGo courses deliver and function well.

Courses created with ReadyGo also have the capability to have their style sheet (look and feel/layout) changed at run-time. By providing multiple links to the course (each with a different style sheet), the same content can be delivered to PDAs, high resolution screens, customers requiring large print, etc. The advantage of this is that the content only needs to be managed and generated once. As soon as it is updated, it will be updated for all the different platforms without additional effort.

Course creators outside of the US

2008-08-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

India should be proud of its newly gained visibility in the IT field. Likewise, India should keep a paranoid eye out. The American expression would be "easy come...easy go..." The other expression I would throw out as a caution would be "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." That is, India may pull jobs away from the US because of cost advantages today, but tomorrow they will be pulled away from India by China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. As India's personnel gain experience they will need to compete against staff from the US, Europe, and eventually Russia (which has always had a deep pool of very educated, and very under-utilized talent).

Property and intellectual rights issues should be strongly considered. In the US, because of the legal system, developers have to avoid copying anyone else's ideas and intellectual property. This concept is taking time to take root outside the US & Europe. There are some extremely creative personnel in developing nations, but there is also a large population of new developers that have no issue "borrowing" designs from other developers. Culturally, they see nothing wrong with it...nobody gets hurt. It is not a physical object. Ideas are seen as "community property". Software/courseware is still seen as an intangible object, therefore open to replication.

Yes, it would be good for US personnel to make courses less "American", however, the reality is that the US is a bit of an "island". We Americans love to export ideas/culture, but are rather hesitant about importing ideas/cultural values. Reality #2 is that business goes where the market is, and until the Rest Of World ("ROW") economically grows past the US/Canada GDP, the strongest pole of attraction will still be the US market. And thus, products sold to the US market will still need to be acceptable to the American consumer.

Choosing Authoring tools

2008-07-29T11:45:00.000-07:00


Regardless of what you choose, when you are reviewing tools, be weary of
the really slick 2-minute demos.  Some tools look really easy and slick.

Watch the course 4 or 5 times to see how it holds up to repetition.
Will your learners be able to use the content as reference material
during their daily tasks?  Think about what makes Google usable- if
animation was useful, wouldn't Google have the found links fly in?
Choose tools where the content delivers quickly (ie. the end user
doesn't have to wait for a download before the content starts) and the
student can skip over material they already know.

I see authoring tools fall into several categories:
1. PowerPoint Converters: Articulate, Breeze, etc.  Authoring is done in
PPT, and these "tools" just convert it into a slide show, perhaps adding
a test at the end.  Breeze is more of a synchronous delivery mechanism
(like WebEx, Citrix GoTo, etc.).  Instructional design is pretty much
non-existent.  Why does this matter?  If all you care about is
completing the author's task, it doesn't matter.  If you want ROI, and
to get learners to actually use the content, you need to make a good
experience for the learners.  I recommend using these tools only if your
presentation is 2-5 minutes.  Beyond that, the learners will drift away.
You can actually use just PPT 2003 or later without resorting to other
tools if this is your objective.
2. Animated Screen-capture movies/Simulation: Captivate, Qarbon Viewlet
Builder, Camtasia:   These tools create elements that you can add to
your course.  They make good components to put on sub-pages so that
those students interested in further details can drill down to them.
These tools are a little more difficult to use (properly).
3. WYSIWYG tools ("PowerPoint on Steroids"):  ToolBook, Lectora,
Authorware: These tools present you a pretty much blank screen and let
you set up the instructional design from scratch (or from an
pre-existing template).  Generally, you should story-board before using
these tools.   I've seen that these tools have a print-paradigm
assumption.  This means that courses they produce only display correctly
on certain size monitors, and can't be re-sized.  One way the tools get
around this limitation is to take over the entire screen, so that the
student can't really use the course as a guide to an application they
are learning.
4. Web-paradigm tools: DreamWeaver, ReadyGo: These tools produce web
content that delivers properly on multiple browsers regardless of screen
size/resolution. Multi-level navigation is easy to build (so that the
user isn't locked into a linear course flow - they can choose what is of
interest to them).  DreamWeaver is probably too difficult for most
occasional course developers to use.

How to Condense Training

2008-07-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

A good way to condense the training is to break it into an on-line part and an in-class part. The on-line part can start with a pre-course session that brings all the users up to a level of knowledge of basic terms and ideas that are required to take the in-class part. After the in-class portion, another on-line course can be given to ensure that the learners remember the pertinent points, have more examples available about application of the pertinent points, and have a chance to refresh/gel the concepts covered in the intensive in-class portion. The adage about "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them" is very applicable here. In the pre-course, prepare them for the main course. This can include a lot of foundation material. For the employees who already know the material, they can quickly skip over (and they won't feel like you wasted two days of their time with it), while for the employees who aren't yet familiar, they can spend as much time as they need to get up to a basic proficiency level. One of the keys to making on-line training successful is to present each concept 4 or 5 different ways since each learner will benefit differently from the various presentations. Instead of just having PowerPoint slides posted on-line, each page should have content (or links) such as main ideas, case studies, step-by-step procedure, detailed explanation, history of the approach, a quiz (non-graded), a test (graded), a field study, or an exercise. This gives the learners enough opportunities to view the material that they can learn it without having to have an instructor hold their hand through every detail.

As you look over the course outline, it should become apparent what material is the most critical. This material can be presented in the pre- and post-course, but it is essential that it be presented in the face-to-face sessions.

XML - why do I keep hearing this?

2008-07-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing "XML XML XML".  Yes, it is a good file storage format -
but it only becomes a displayable content when you combine in style
sheets.  A series of XML pages does not make a course any more than a
series of text pages does.  Downloading and editing XML in a text/XML
editor (like Notepad) is a somewhat cumbersome approach that I wouldn't
impose on an SME.

Besides, with all the extensibility options for XML, we're back to a
tower of Babel.  For example, suppose there is a 3.25.
All we know is that someone called it a value.  How did they calculate
it?  We don't know.  What can we do with it?  We can display it with the
format for "value", whatever that may be.  Instructionally, it still has
no meaning.  The big advantage I see to XML is that you can get
open-source (free) parsers.  So you can break down XML files into the
component variable/value pairs without starting from scratch.  However,
you still need to understand what to do with each variable/value pair in
order to gain any advantage from it.  XML is not a solution - it is an
implementation.

So, I would say "Microsoft Office converters" do NOT fall into the
authoring system categories.  Without going outside the Microsoft Office
tools themselves, you can already save as XML, MS-HTML (their own
special flavors), etc.  You'll need to consider Excel, PPT, Notepad,
WordPerfect, WordStar, TeX, and MS-Word appropriate eLearning Authoring
tools if you consider a format converter a tool also.  A tool should at
least add some instructional value (e.g. trackable test questions).

The category I missed/excluded was LCMSs.  These are database
repositories from which you are able to create courses by assembling the
pieces that have been placed into the database.  Their installation and
support costs/requirements can be quite high.  I prefer a stand-alone
software approach (like MS-Word, MS-Excel, ReadyGo) to authoring
documents, spreadsheets, etc.  Also, I like to review the content before
it is published to ensure that I don't produce ransom note appearances
by just bundling together a grab-bag or content.

Building courses fast

2008-07-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

There is more to speeding up the turn-around than using specific tools. The real key is to design the development process for fast turn-around. Several of our customers have used the "Content Factory" approach, and have been able to move from creating 50 courses per year to 450 without adding personnel.

The first step is to decide which courses are "traditional" and which are "rapid". Traditional course will have a longer shelf-life, so one can afford to include more high-production elements. These courses can take up to 2 months to create. Rapid courses are for fast-moving material. They can be created in a matter of hours. The key to the fast turn-around is to dispense with high-production elements like professional multimedia and voice overs.

Traditional course creation typically requires that the content/text people deliver their material to the graphic artists who then assemble the courses with high visual production costs/values.

The course production for rapid content separates the "visual" element, staffed by graphic designers and the "textual" or "content" portion. A tool like the ReadyGo Web Course Builder allows the subject matter experts or the "text" people to assemble the graphics with the content and output the course in a few hours. This way, instead of requiring 2 months for 2 people to create a course, one individual can create a course in a single day. Graphic elements are re-used. They surround the text, which contains the primary information. By implementing the primary content as text rather than graphics (e.g. Flash) the courses can be maintained and updated much more quickly.

Cost justiyfing an LMS

2008-07-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

The costs of LMSs are typically much higher than advertised. A rule of thumb is 1x for the hardware, 2x for the software, and 3x for installation services (and that doesn't include content conversion.) That is, if you paid $50K for the hardware on which you ran the software, you would need to pay $100K for the software, and then $200K additional for installation, configuration, and running of the software.

With LMSs, the typical installation process takes 2-3 years. They need to merge their database system with your company's database. This requires custom consulting services since the database designs are usually quite different. This cost needs to be factored in. However, if you want to use the LMS as an independent system (that is, every time someone gets hired or leaves your company, you have to record this fact on your LMS rather than inheriting it from the enterprise employee system), then you can reduce the installation process to a 1-2 month period.

When choosing an LMS, it is important to define your needs, rather than deciding what LMS-vendor-provided-features you'd like. For example, the majority of LMSs will only store a single score and a single pass/fail status for each student/course. So, after you spend many 100's of thousands of dollars, you still won't be able to use the LMS to carry out a survey or see why nobody got higher than 90% on a particular course (was it a bad question? Did you not cover the information in your course?). Before investing in a full LMS, I recommend starting off with a testing assessment system that has full reporting capabilities. For a few thousand dollars you will get a much better idea of your needs.

And then, there is the cost of converting courseware. I have seen no cases where off-the-shelf courseware (e.g. MS-Office Basics, Accounting Basics, etc.) are used at the levels envisioned. Typical usage that I have seen is about 15% of what was desired. Most training content is custom to the company. So, you should become familiar with course creation. In doing so, I recommend taking a course on web instructional design (or visit http://www.readygo.com/isd). There are many factors about the web experience that need to be taken into account in order to get return-on-investment for your courses. Simply converting PowerPoint and adding an audio track will be very easy and inviting to the course authors, however, will be a repellent to the company's employees. When viewing web courses, the more control you give the user, the more efficient they will be (in zeroing in on the content they need), the higher their satisfaction, and the higher the chance that you will earn back the cost of your investment. If they have to sit through 1 hour of an automated slide show, of which they already know 90% of the content, you have just wasted 54 minutes of their time, and learners will not forget this the next time you offer them eLearning.

Not my post - but worthwhile reading

2008-07-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

I think this article is worth spending a few minutes on:

http://www.codeproject.com/News.aspx?nwid=6996

Al

Quick and dirty Office converters

2008-07-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

What I (and learners) find unsatisfactory is the tools that take a
single Word document, turn it into a single-page course, put in the
minimum SCORM API initialize/finish calls, build a 10 line XML manifest
pointing to a single file, and then call this a "SCORM course".  The course creators
goal appears to be SCORM Conformance, rather than instruction.  I also
find LMSs that only track the very minimum required by the specification
to be a disservice.  For many course authors, whose goal is to get the
"SCORM Conformant" deliverable off their desk, this kind of tool is
certainly attractive.  From the studies our customers have done
(comparing these approaches to instructionally sound tools), the
learners are quite unhappy with it.  I think people can do better than
the bear minimum.

The specifications (SCORM/AICC) are available so that you can create
useful courses, so that you can see what the students are doing, and so
that you can tune your course based on how the students perform.  The
ReadyGo tool has been tested with lots of LMSs.  We have seen what they
can and can't do and have customized our interfaces (available to all
customers) for many of the LMSs in order to take advantage of the
different implementations.  (The author only needs to select a different
LMS from a pull-down menu.  The tool does all the other necessary work.)

A large number of LMSs only store the very minimum required by the
specifications.  There are a few LMSs that actually go to the effort of
capturing the student's responses - and a few of them even provide
reasonable reports to the course administrator.

Quick and dirty Office converters can produce "SCORM
conformant" content.  What I question is whether they produce good
training.  I also can't see that the effort has been made to take
advantage of different behaviors that are achievable within the
specifications.  I just think that "Lowest Common Denominator"
approaches will produce employees functioning at the lowest levels.  I
also think it will scare learners away from eLearning - a few years ago
I took an on-line course that was mostly audio.  Unfortunately, the
computer I was using didn't have speakers.  I took the test without
reading the content, and considered the whole exercise a waste of
time...and I had additional motivation to see what they had done with
the course implementation-wise.  Scaring people away from on-line
training by creating bad content is a good way to guarrantee your own
unemployment in the long run.

Al Moser
ReadyGo

About authoring tools

2008-06-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Within eLearning, I believe that there are certain tasks that will not
be accessible to the generalist user - primarily graphic arts work.
However, the tools available are now enabling the Subject Matter Expert
to be able to do something they previously could not: create coherent,
well implemented, multi-page content.  The standards (SCORM/AICC) aren't
 changing how development is being done - but they do help make it
possible to track more, different content using a variety of LMSs.
(These standards are relatively young.)

A good approach is to give tools to the SME/Instructional Designer so
that they can input, maintain, and update the textual content of the
courses.  Good tools also allow them to manage additional
graphics/multimedia created by specialists in those areas, without
burdening the SME/ID with graphic work.  There are still many tools
(advertized as "easy to use") out there that are only accessible to a
graphic designer in order to do the textual content.  This is a problem
because graphic designers with instructional design and subject matter
expertise are hard to find.

The real value for the standards are, and will be:
1. Interoperability of content (communication for tracking)
2. (Currently becoming available:) Communication to allow more dynamic
content (a database-driven server-based system can alter paths of
instruction)
3. (Future:) Interesting ways to combine content and provide more data
exchange.

Fake SCORM limitations that mask LMS or authoring tool limitations

2008-06-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

A number of people think there are SCORM limitations when the real limitation is the LMS or authoring tool who then blames it on SCORM. One of my favorite fake limitations has to do with screen size. There is nothing in the SCORM specification that requires a fixed size
screen. The concept of the fixed size screen is a hold-over (with
enormous inertia) from the print paradigm. That is, graphic designers
have gotten accustomed to specifying layout of every pixel of every
letter with respect to fixed size pages. Most tools have been adapted
to this concept: to maintain the precise duplication between the
authoring environment and what the page looks like at delivery,
regardless of student's settings, you have to specify a fixed size.
However, this is really bad web etiquette:
1. Pages either take up too much of the screen (requiring horizontal
scrolling to read a single line) or too little (a small box within a
larger screen area).
2. Accessibility and respect for student's browser default settings are
ignored. If a user wants his default font size to be 20pt, but the
course is built with the print paradigm, their desire will be ignored.
Then, it will be difficult for them to read the content.
3. Content doesn't rearrange if the student wants to put their course in
one half of the screen so that they can work on other tasks in the other
half.

Please see the ReadyGo authoring tool that creates SCORM conformant
courses that resize to the student's browser size. If you want to, you
can also select a template that uses a fixed size screen.

Getting courses out fast

2008-06-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

As with PowerPoint content creation, the fastest way to handle the turn-around and review cycles is to let the subject matter expert drive. That is, if the SME is in charge of assembling, editing, and publishing the content, you will get the fastest turn-around. However, for this to be effective, the process has to be broken down. In PPT production, the level and use of graphics/multimedia is typically minimal. For web content/eLearning, people want to do a lot more. The difficulty is that SMEs are not typically good at creating multimedia (nor should they be).

Typically the solution to this limitation is then to have the graphics/multimedia experts create the courseware, however, now you are stuck with several problems:
1. Lack of familiarity with the content: Inappropriate graphics/multimedia end up being incorporated into the course
2. Desire by the graphic artists to show off: They want to show what they are capable of doing. This drives up the costs, and is contrary to "rapid" concepts.
3. Communication breakdowns between SME and implementer. We all know about the 20 iterations due to the spell-checker that replaces the correct technical term with one that is a more common, but closely spelled word.

The SME can be empowered to be the manager/assembler of content, but there is a little bit of training and up-front assignment of tasks that needs to be carried out.
1. Most SMEs are comfortable with PPT, and don't want to move past this one-dimensional, face-to-face presentation style. With eLearning, the content has to be 3-dimensional (hierarchical page structure, plus links to other resources) so that a self-study environment is successful. (If you handed out your 3x5 speaker notes with a recording of you reading the content, would people find this engaging?) The SME has to provide multiple presentations of the same content so that people with different learning styles can adapt the content to their needs. This actually is not that difficult to explain to SMEs.
2. Separate the task of graphic/multimedia creation. The SME can provide descriptions of what additional visuals they want that can augment the content. (Flying bullets and page transitions are visually distracting and do not provide additional information. A moving flow diagram might be useful, as would a blow-up of an assembly.)
3. A standard look-and-feel template needs to be decided ahead of time. Otherwise, the SME will end up spending all their time trying to figure out which layout for the content they want. What I mean by this, is that they will fixate on placing a forward arrow 3 pixels up on one page and 3 pixels left on the other, and never implement the content of interest. Keep in mind that with eLearning (if done properly) there is no need for the content to control the learner's environment -- that is, your content should adjust to the end-user's screen preferences rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all screen size and content size on the learners. Learners like the web because they control where and what they see. If you take the control away from them, they will lose interest in the courses you are trying to provide.

Then, with a proper tool that does the bookkeeping for how the pages are managed, how the tables of contents are built, etc. an SME can actually control the process. Since the SME is the expert in the material, the fastest production will occur when they can create, control, and revise the material. We have found that people with a journalism approach akin to the nightly news are excellent at creating and managing rapid eLearning. In contrast, people whose approach is more like a full length feature movie production are more appropriately applied to traditional eLearning (CBT delivered over the web). Our customers have reported being able to produce 20 courses in one month with a staff of 1 person using the above rapid approach. Previously, they were using a traditional approach that yielded 1 course per month per developer.

My take on analysts and their reports

2008-05-29T11:42:00.001-07:00

What I have seen is that there are a few different categories of
analysts.  Keep in mind that they have businesses to run (and if they
can't keep their businesses operating, we don't get the benefits of
their work):

1. The analysts who reflect what the "big boys" are doing.  This group
is considered vendor neutral, except that they will tell you that the
most widely used tools are the best.  By doing this, they will not
offend any of their customers who bring them in to review their
approaches. Currently, they are showcasing Microsoft PowerPoint, because
that is what so many trainers are already using.  There is no discussion
of learner satisfaction (which is pretty poor when it comes to
asynchronously delivered presentations.)  They are promoting the status
quo, and driving the decision makers to follow the pack: "driving by
looking in the rear view mirror".  This approach is "safe" from a
business point of view. (They would have recommended horse-and-cart as
the best car in the 1900-1920 time period.)

2. The analysts who reflect what they are paid to.  This group masks
paid advertisements as "white papers" and "studies".  Our company has
been approached by some of these companies who are writing reports about
all the tools in the market.  We are told that if we don't purchase a
$20K "case study" from them about us, there is a chance that our tool
won't show up in their study.  They have followed through on their threat.

So, when people review analyst reports, it is important that they keep
this in mind.  Just because an analyst has written about a tool in their
report, does not mean that the tool is being unbiasedly endorsed as the
"best" approach or even as an "effective" approach.

The Brendon Hall authoring tools reflect what the vendors submit to them.  They
provide an excellent service as a collection of what is available (and
are worth the money), but should be considered in this light.  Many
vendors will market-spin when it comes to what they submit, e.g. they
will say they are completely ADA compliant when they produce a separate
single file that is the text from the entire course, but the course
really delivered is all chained graphics (not ADA compliant).  Similarly
they will say they are SCORM conformant, but they track no student
responses.

Regarding W3C standards, I am glad that finally people are asking about
building web courses that actually consider "web" design.  The W3C
standards really do lead to learner satisfaction and accessibility (e.g.
look at Google - does it use flying bullets?).  Learner satisfaction and
accessibility lead to return on investment and to lower
maintenance/support costs.

five thoughts on eLearning

2008-05-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

1. The "tell-test" model works best when it is a
"tell-repeat-test-tell-repeat another way-test..." method.  It has been
proven over the years to work better.  Replacing it with Wikis,
podcasts, walkman-casts, virtual campuses, etc. doesn't replace it.  It
just delivers it differently.  Can you do tests from Wikis or PodCasts?
(I don't think so.)
2. I believe people have become disenchanted with e-learning because
companies put the "cart before the horse".  I see that billions of
dollars were spent on LMSs before any courses had been created.  This is
like building a railway network without having any locomotives.  There
is nothing wrong with the web technologies - just with the way they were
sold.  Similarly, courses were built as evolutions from presentations
instead of evolutions from web pages.  A self-propelled presentation is
a bad way of training, just like correspondence courses, cassette-based
courses, VCR courses, ...  A web page with multiple navigation paths,
repeating the information several ways, followed by frequent tests is
much more compelling.  It is called "Instructional Design".  That is
what has been lacking from many of the products out there.  No matter
how good the technology, if you present content poorly, it will not give
ROI.
3. Should we jump to new technologies?  New technologies have their
place.  However, if we use them without considering instructional design
- or what the end-user is actually doing - they will be no more
effective.  For example, we have seen that if you have audio in a
course, the student's eyes drift away to other tasks.  Soon their mind
drifts away too.  If they are forced to read, without other
distractions, knowledge retention increases dramatically.  Wikis are
great as reference material look-ups (as long as they don't get clogged
with garbage.)  PodCasts allow asynchronous delivery of speeches, but I
would be cautious because of the easy distraction factor.  Social
networking will work great for improving chances of the employees
getting their next job.  Wikis, PodCasts, Bulletin Boards, Chat Rooms,
Multimedia etc. are excellent technologies to augment the basic content,
but should not be considered a replacement.   Moving to the next level
of technologies reminds me of a phrase I once learned: "I'm working on
my second million dollars....I gave up on the first".
4. Page-turners, if done right can be effective.  PPT by itself does not
make a compelling presentation - it takes content and an effective
presenter.  If you get rid of the live presenter (recordings don't
count), it is harder to make the material complete.  If you take
advantage of web navigation and hierarchical design, you can fill in for
the missing live instructor.  Leaving all your testing for the end of
the course is less effective than mingling multiple questions in the middle.

Page-turners can be really bad if you are limited to putting 3 bullets
on a page.  The web allows you to structure your content so that you
break it up in instructionally meaningful ways.  PPT and tools like it
force you to break up your content so that it fits on a screen.  Don't
blame "page-turners".  Many authoring tools were designed and
effectively sold because they look so much like PPT with a test at the end.
5. Yes... see  #4.  Distracting multimedia and flying bullets are
exciting for the course author, but they are really annoying for the
student who has to see them 3 or 4 times.

5.I think many LMSs and instructors have been looking at the web
technologies to fit their current instructional models instead of
molding their instructional approaches to fit the web.  That is, LMSs
force courses to be a one-time event. You take the course, you take the
test, you're evaluated, you're done, you never see the content again.
The web should be used to flip this around.  Once you know where the
content is (e.g. google), you go there when you need it.  You should be
able  to take the tests as many times as you want.  You should be able
to use the material in a just-in-time fashion.  Why memorize the
material, if you can find it quickly?  Proper web instructional design
considering "just-in-time use" makes this possible.  A linear "page
turner" discourages this approach.  A "page turner" with additional
navigation and proper tables of contents can achieve the advantages of
web technologies.  But if the content is bad, it doesn't matter how you
deliver it.

Why use a web authoring tool for eLearning?

2008-05-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Why use a web authoring tool for eLearning? I use MS-Word, but not to create courseware.
I don't use MS-Word for standup presentations either. Why? because
there is no instructional design or web delivery structure inherently
built into it. It reminds me of the early days of PowerPoint, when
everyone said, "why do I need another tool? I can just use WordPerfect
to create the presentations. You see, they're just as good as your
PowerPoint ones." This is why a WordProcessing staff was still needed -
because the WordPerfect built presentations were lousy. Just as today,
the courseware built in PowerPoint or even your beloved MS-Word leave a
lot to be desired. Once people started using PPT, they saw the benefit
of a tool designed for the purpose. I believe that once people start
using proper eLearning tools designed for web delivery they will see the
benefit of a tool designed properly for the purpose.

To your questions: "Does it work? Does it say time and money?" I would add:
1. Has employee (rather than course builder) productivity been increased?
2. Are the learners giving positive feedback?
3. Are the learners re-using the content on an as-needed basis?

Without positive answers for all these questions, the approach/tools
will only lead to corporate frustration, and a long delay in adoption of
eLearning in a manner where it will succeed. By success, I mean become
a part of everyday processes and have tangible measurable benefits beyond:
1. Course developer didn't have to learn a new tool
2. Course developer got deliverable off their desk in record time
3. Course developer has no more courses to build because rest of staff
found the content boring, insulting, and difficult to use.

Why are people asking for XML?

2008-05-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't mind if everyone was saying "MS-Word, MS-Word, MS-Word".
What concerns me is that XML is a behind-the scenes recommendation. It
is like saying "roman alphabet". It gives you some structure, but does
not solve your problems. Solutions can be built utilizing it as an
intermediate step. The same solutions could be built using any other
data storage mechanism. If you look at the "X" in "XML", it stands for
"eXtensible". This means that any one can make their own proprietary
version (like Microsoft has done), immediately defeating the
interchangeability that everyone praises XML for. I think XML is good,
but it is only a step towards people being able to talk to each other
(or in this case machines or programs). Currently I find HTML to be a
better standard because its purpose is more tightly defined, and there
is wider agreement on how it works.

XML by itself does not save any money. If I sent you a SCORM manifest
written in XML, MS-Word would have no idea what to do with it. If I
send this same document to a browser, all it can do is display it. If I
send it to a SCORM conformant LMS, now there is a system that can do
something with it. Just because something is XML does NOT mean that it
will work everywhere with everything or even that it will save any
money. If XML were a standard, maybe it would solve the problems that
need to be solved. As it is, the communication is only improved when
both sides speak the same variant of XML.

Applying Classroom training to eLearning

2008-05-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

Over the web, it is much easier for the extroverts to
dominate the conversation and for the introverts to hide. One of the
big advantages of eLearning is precisely that the students can study at their own
pace and NOT be forced into someone else's as is the case in classroom
training. What you need to think about is how, when, and if you want to apply classroom metrics to web
based training.

I have talked to very many customers who are dealing
with regulating bodies that are applying the following requirements from
classroom training. Perhaps they need to think a little more deeply
than just transferring classroom concepts to the web.
1. Track how long a student takes a course. (This is supposed to be
self-paced. Does everyone have to work to the average time? It should
be about what they learned; not how long it took them to learn it.)
2. Ensure that the person didn't cheat. (If you assume everyone is
dishonest, then DON'T do distance-based testing. If you're willing to
accept people's affidavits of being who they are, taking the test alone,
and taking the test "closed book", then distance-based testing is
acceptable. Most people are honest.)
3. Make sure people don't steal the content and re-use it. (Just as
with published books, there is no sure-fire way of protecting published
material. These days, printed material can just be run through an
optical character recognition package with a cheap scanner, and it is
now easily reproducible.)

Some ideas that will work on the web:
1. Test test test. Give several tests throughout the course (not just
at the end of the chapter/course). It is OK to repeat the questions.
At the minimum the students will learn the material because they had to
answer the question so many times.
2. Test questions should be tied to the content. If you want to force
the students to read the content (rather than just skipping to the
tests), make the quesitons content-sensitive. That is, instead of "What
regulation applies to a company exporting widgets of Type B to India?"
the question should be "What regulation applies to Widget's
Incorporated, discussed on page 3.6?"
3. Randomize questions and answers to that answer keys posted by the
copier are useless.
4. Require that material be presented in 3 or 4 formats: Bullet points,
white-paper, step-by-step procedure, interactive exercise, etc. Since
different people learn from different expository styles, a variety of
styles will make the content more effective.
5. Blend self-paced study with moderated sessions. It would be easy to
require a 1 hour session with a live moderator as part of a training
program. The classic requirements can then be applied to the moderated
session.
6. Web-based tests must capture what the student answered. Many systems
only provide a "score". I believe this is lame. By tracking all
answers provided, the students can be evaluated better, and the test
questions can also be evaluated.

Wouldn't it be great ...

2008-05-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be great if LMSs and course
developers got away from the print paradigm (fixed, pre-defined size)
and evolved to the web paradigm (size based on end-user
preference/needs).  Nothing in SCORM or AICC requires fixed screen sizes
- these are just a compromise because so much eLearning is implemented
by graphic artists (rather than subject matter experts or instructional
designers).

It is nice that Flash content can resize, however, I believe it still
has serious accessibility and searchability problems. Blind readers
cannot obtain the content nor can search engines without an external
(XML, for example) dump of all the text.   Typically this dump does not
contain the content instructional organization that an HTML-based web
course would contain.  For fully sighted students, a search engine that
can bring them to content based on keyword search is an enormous
productivity boost.   We should really be tapping the power of the web
(just-in-time research/training) rather than trying to hammer presential
training precepts (fixed size content, fixed seat time, test only at the
end, etc.) in order to have successful eLearning.

Pop-ups within Training courses

2008-04-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

Random pop-ups advertising undesirable content/products are more a
feature of random web surfing than of going to a known location for a
specific course.

Unfortunately the web is being destroyed by the "solutions" to unethical
behavior.  So, while a pop-up may be a good idea for training, default
browser settings have annulled it as an option.
1. Microsoft has set their defaults to disable all cookies from
non-Microsoft sites.  Cookies can be very useful for training that is
taken across several sessions.
2. Microsoft has set their defaults to disable "Active Scripting" (aka
JavaScript) while at the same time enables "ActiveX Controls" (aka the
mechanism by which spyware installs itself on your computer).  Without
JavaScript, you have to use plug-ins (like ActiveX or Flash).  ActiveX
should be disabled because it is a really bad security risk.  It is
designed to seamlessly merge Word, PPT, Excel, Outlook, etc. with the
web/outside world. Of course since you could write a complete operating
system within Word, this opens the door.  Java, on the other hand, is
designed to not allow the web into your hard drive, but it is getting
really hard to deploy because the MS operating systems avoid supporting
it.  The newer MS-operating systems are easier to lock-down, making it
impossible for a regular user to install the plug-ins.
3. e-mail filters/spam blockers are blocking lots of legitimate e-mail.
 Many spam blockers don't let the sender know about the blockage, so
there is no way of knowing if your e-mail is being ignored or if it
never arrived.

Tips for creating effective content

2008-04-23T14:42:00.001-07:00

eLearning works best when...
1. Content is broken down into 10-20 minute chunks (a "courselet").
Interruptions usually happen faster than that, but 10-20 minutes is the
general concentration span before saturation (or boredom) kicks in.
2. Courses are built so that they can be taken over several sessions
3. Content is searchable so that students can come back to it when they
need details.  That is, instead of making them memorize a series of
steps for a procedure, teach them where they can find those steps
written down.  When they need it, they should be able to get it.
4. Content is delivered at the student's pace, not the instructor's.
Avoid self-propelled PowerPoint (especially those with flying bullets
and dancing pigs.)  Instead provide more web-like delivery (like Google
does).
5. Content shows up quickly - avoid long downloads like videos or a
Flash that has to download entirely before playing.

Creating courses that work well on the web

2008-04-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be great if LMSs and course
developers got away from the print paradigm (fixed, pre-defined size courses)
and evolved to the web paradigm (size based on end-user
preference/needs).  Nothing in SCORM or AICC requires fixed screen sizes
- these are just a compromise because so much eLearning is implemented
by graphic artists (rather than subject matter experts or instructional
designers).

It is nice that Flash content can resize, however, I believe it still
has serious accessibility and searchability problems. Blind readers
cannot obtain the content nor can search engines without an external
(XML, for example) dump of all the text.   Typically this dump does not
contain the content instructional organization that an HTML-based web
course would contain.  For fully sighted students, a search engine that
can bring them to content based on keyword search is an enormous
productivity boost.   We should really be tapping the power of the web
(just-in-time research/training) rather than trying to hammer presential
training precepts (fixed size content, fixed seat time, test only at the
end, etc.) in order to have successful eLearning.

advantages of eLearning

2008-04-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Here are some advantages of eLearning:

1. Asynchronous content can be available 24 hours/day.  This way, in organizations lie hospitals all 3 shifts of staff can view content during their down time.  Also, employees can view the content from home, when a live presenter would be unavailable.
2. If done properly, the content can serve as a just-in-time reference. That is, instead of people memorizing all the procedures, they can learn where to look it up (e.g. a search engine on your training site). Then, they can look up the details as they need them. (Avoid PPT converted to web-viewable content - it is not complete enough for self-paced material or as reference material.  Trainees will skip
through it as quickly as possible.)
3. Trainees can view the content over and over until they understand it. Present each topic in 4 or 5 different modalities (e.g. simulation, video, step-by-step procedure, picture sequence, etc.)  This way you can reach all different learner.  (In face-to-face training the instructor can only address the majority needs.)
4. Content done properly can reach the disabled without needing extra
interpreters.

If you only provide information in an eLearning format, it is important that the content use best of breed web approaches in addition to sound instructional
design.

Where Wikis fit in

2008-04-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Wikis can work as reference repositories (not as training courses), but
the following is needed:
1. A writing style that everyone must adhere to.
2. A librarian person who can review and delete content that is
incorrect/undesirable.
3. Discipline by ALL people involved to ensure that content is not
inadvertently deleted or changed to follow one person's opinions.

If the above conditions are not met, the wiki will suffer from:
1. Material will become obsolete from lack of care
2. One or two people will dominate the content
3. A mischievous (or disgruntled) employee can undo or sabotage all the
work done by the others

Where Wikis will not work is as training material.  There is no real
flow or instructional organization.  A wiki can soon become an
umanageable jumble of random articles and opinions, just like many
collaborative web sites have become.

Additionally, there is no requirement that the trainers create/maintain
the wikis.  If the trainers hand off all wiki creation to the subject
matter experts, they will soon find themselves obsoleted, unless they
make a good case for the need for instructional design.

In my opinion, wikis can be useful as an adjunct to training courses. 
Similarly, the training courses (if produced as web content rather than
as face-to-face content ported to the web) can become the material for
just-in-time training.  A good course building tool will allow a simple
search engine to index the content in the courses.  Once you have
searchable material (and a search engine), web courses become true
"just-in-time" training.

Creating a collaborative course development process

2008-04-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

Creating a collaborative course development process. While good tools can help, it is fundamental to have a process that properly assigns the various tasks in the collaborative process to the individuals involved. "Good separation of the tasks into those done by subject-matter experts (who should ultimately be responsible for assembly and maintenance of the courses), graphics experts (who are currently responsible for the assembly and maintenance), quality assurance, and other roles will improve the process dramatically."

As for tools, there are two basic types available, including "server-based" tools and "desktop-based" tools.

Server-based development tools, he says, include learning content management systems (LCMSs) and wikis. Yet, while such tools are quite seductive, strong and firm processes need to be put into place in order for them to work successfully, warns Moser.

"If everyone is using a browser-based authoring tool to modify the same collection of course content, there is a high risk of concurrent development resulting in disjointed courses. These tools also suffer when changes are desired to large graphics/multimedia files because they require re-upload of the entire file before any preview can be done."

A desktop approach, on the other hand, is similar to the way in which people typically create and manage complex Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint documents. Each contributor is given an assignment by the project lead, and these assignments vary from several chapters of text and/or development of specific multimedia to creation of specific graphics and/or designing a course navigation look and feel. Each contributor then uses the specialized tools for his or her tasks (e.g., Microsoft Word for text development; Flash, Camtasia or ViewletBuilder for simulations; and Photoshop, Illustrator or PaintShopPro for graphics). Finally, a desktop-based e-learning or Web-content authoring tool is used to assemble the content.

So what is wrong with the Next button?

2008-04-04T10:11:00.001-07:00

Just exactly what is wrong with a "Next" button?  I agree that if it is
the only navigation available, the student is boxed into an
organizationally vacuous course (e.g. PowerPoint).  If you don't have a
"Next" button (and a "Back" button), then you just have a collection of
interlinked pages with no instructionally recommended order.

PDA/Smartphone support for web courses

2008-04-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Each PDA/Smartphone seems to have different capabilities in their
built-in browsers. Some like iPhone have good support of JavaScript, so
it is possible to use HTML-based SCORM courses (like those produced by
the ReadyGo Web Course Builder) directly from the device without the
need for installing another player. Meanwhile Flash-based courses will
be beyond the reach of any PDA/Smartphone for a few more years. I don't
know of any PDA that supports Flash through their browser.

We have posted a course with our experiences (to-date) at
http://www.readygo.com/training/mobile-elearning/

We're impressed by the quality of the Minimo browser (firefox/Mozilla
for Windows Mobile), but unfortunately, our experience is that an
overwhelming majority of end-users will not install new applications on
their cell-phone.

Randomizing test questions with SCORM

2008-03-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

With SCORM/AICC tracking, you can do limited randomization based on pooling. That is, on the test page, create more questions than what you want to display. Then, set the number of questions to display to the desired quantity. When the page displays, certain questions will be randomly hidden. So there is some level of randomization without the need for our Server Side Testing module. ReadyGo's SST module provides a more complete randomization ability, and more complete result storage/reporting (every answer to every question every time it is submitted.)

True randomization cannot be done with SCORM/AICC because this requires involvement from a web server. Prior to SCORM 2004, there was no LMS support for anything approaching randomization. With SCORM 2004, we see from the specification that it is technically possible, but it is not pretty. Each question has to be on a separate page, and the LMS would have to randomize the order of page delivery. I don't know of any LMSs that support this. As a side note, ReadyGo spent a large effort implementing as complete a version of SCORM 1.2 as we could, and we then found that the majority of LMSs only supported a very minimal subset of what we transmitted. In many cases, the extra information we sent the LMSs caused the LMS to crash. The customers who experienced this typically came to us to fix the problem since their LMSs dont give them support. The irony is that our tool costs $500, and they are paying upwards of $150,000 for the LMSs.

new terms for existing technologies

2008-03-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Discussion groups have been around since before the web (they were
called "bulletin boards").  You could access them through gopher before
http existed.  Wikis are just bulletin boards that are organized more
randomly (less by thread).  Blogs are just server-based authoring
through a browser with a limited number of pages.  I would not
categorize either of these as "Web 2.0".

I fear the "Web 2.0" is being hijacked by vendors just as "Rapdid
eLearning" has been.  The terms have been distorted to fit marketing
purposes.  I would refer you to the following:
For a more practical definition of Web 2.0 as it would apply to
eLearning: http://www.readygo.com/e-learning-2.0.pdf
For a more practical definition of Rapid eLearning:
http://www.readygo.com/isd/index.htm?start_file=ele02/01ele02.htm
(Note that the eLearning portions are part of a larger course that has
next/back buttons, tables of contents, and other links.  Also, if you
start from http://www.readygo.com/isd your responses to test questions
are tracked.  Like a Wiki, but with tracking and navigation.  This was
built and is maintained using the ReadyGo authoring tool.)

PENS - A better SCORM?

2008-03-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

PENS will be a good complement to SCORM.

SCORM covers the following:
1. What page do you launch as the start of each SCO.
2. What files are needed for each SCO
3. How the SCO should send information (and receive it) to the server so
that the server can store it.
SCORM 2004, adds conditions for going from one SCO to another. (I
believe this is what Christie was asking about.)

There are still several other issues that are currently handled in
proprietary manners. The main one is "how does the LMS know that there
is a new package available?" This is what PENS would address. In terms of security, I cannot envision a condition where the fact that a new course is available to an LMS would
need to be encrypted - there is no personal data in this transaction.

I have seen tech support requests where customers need to know how to
load a course built with our tool into their LMS. We have to refer them
to their LMS vendor.

Future issues:
1. How does the LMS report the data it has received or export it for
post-processing?
2. What return access does a learner have once they have taken
(completed) a course?

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

2008-03-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Are younger people different then us? Todays pervasive networked communication has to affect their learning behaviors. I suspect that it could even change the 'learned' elements of their cognitive processes.

Early versions of Sesame Street had a lot of very short
(1-2minute) segments. This meant that the kids were trained to have
short span attention, then jump to another topic. The newer Sesame
Street episodes have longer segments, e.g. "Elmo's World", that last
15-30 minutes. Anecdotally, I notice that my 4 year old's attention
span tends to mimic that of the activities and adults around her.

When I was in college, everyone was walking around plugged into a
newfangled revolutionary device called the "Walkman". Everyone was
talking about what a difference this was (as if the transistor radio in
the '50s didn't exist). I watched its prominence fade away when I was in
grad school, and everyone today seems to have forgotten about it.

It just reminds me of the old expression (and I tried to Google it to
find out who said it first, but there were too many links without
attribution)

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

streaming class content ...why?

2008-03-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

I am curious as to why so many people want training to be live, streamed content
over the internet? Isn't this a little bit like asking "what is the best
way to listen to radio using my television set?"

Much of the power of the Internet is that the content does not need to
be delivered live. In order to deliver live video content, everyone
needs a very high bandwidth connection (or a tiny display screen for the
content). Textual content contains more information/knowledge per byte
than any other form of delivery, and it can be searched so that people can
get to the content they need much faster.

I am hopeful that trainers/instructors will evolve past the concept
equating PowerPoint slides with narration to web based training. This
is like equating McDonalds(TM) food with nutrition. There is so much
more power that the Internet provides beyond streaming an in-class
presentation.

The power of online learning that most people miss

2008-03-11T11:45:00.000-07:00

The point I'd really like to drill into the learning community's mind is that
presential (face-to-face) training achieves limited knowledge retention.
I believe the typical measure is that 20-30% of the material presented
is remembered. A PPT-Flash, Video, or PodCast element has similar if
not lower effect. the power of eLearning is that if done like web
content, the students can come back to it over and over. This raises
the efficiency from 20-30% up to 70-80% (my estimate from anectodal
evidence). Then, because the learners know where they can find/access
the content, the remaining retention is unnecessary because they can
find it quickly, either through hierarchical navigation or a search
engine. A PPT or video movie does NOT provide this easy indexed access.

Most SCORM and AICC-based LMSs (and the SCORM community at large) seems
to have missed this point. This is represented by the behavior of most
LMSs where the student is measured on "completion" of the course, and
previous tracking results are overwritten when a new session occurs.
Also the examples where each page of content is a Unit/SCO, and the LCMS
puts the courses together for the sake of author re-usability severely
handicaps the more important learner reusability. When the LMS or LCMS
has to deliver each page as a separate session, rapid student access and
continuity of concentration are impeded. The AICC and SCORM
specifications do not force these implementations, but a large portion
of the community has assumed these approaches because they fit into
their large database paradigm.

Getting video's to work in an eLearning course

2008-03-06T12:32:00.000-08:00

When it comes to video and multimedia, the biggest hurdle is the end-user's computer/connection. You may find that if you use the latest
Codecs and Windows Media Player 11 generation, many of your students won't get to see the video. Similarly if you make the video 1600x1200 pixels, the students will give up before the multimedia has a chance to download. While there are no absolute numbers, here are a few recommendations:

1. Most end-users have Flash installed on their computer. Other media players (like Windows Media Player) are not as consistently installed. So, if you can convert the videos to flash, you'll get a better success rate. Keeping the size around 300 pixels gives a good compromise between view-ability and download speed. (These fall under plug-in/embed).
2. I recommend that every video be justified. That is, is it necessary to present the material as a video? or would it be sufficient to present a series of snapshots? A video is presented at the author/producer's pace. Self-paced training is most effective when the student can control the pace of delivery. If the video is a welcome message from the president of the company, does this add any value to the course? I limit video usage to showing assembly procedures or body gestures that can't be shown cleanly any other way. There is a high cost both in production and delivery time for videos, so they need to be thought through well.
3. Java applets are good if you are getting learner interaction. Otherwise, their cost is difficult to justify.
4. In terms of a camera, I don't have experience with them. Since you'll be reducing the size to something that can be delivered quickly over the web, however, the down-sizing will remove any advantage that one camera has over another. You may want to get a video capture card so that you can record at high quality, and then edit the video on your computer to reduce the size.
5. The main software I recommend is a format converter that can take the output of your camera and convert it to Flash or WMV (if you know all your users will be using Internet Explorer on MS-Windows) format. I would definitely try a bunch of different editing packages before purchasing one.

FUN VS. DEVELOPMENT

2008-03-04T12:22:00.000-08:00

If the focus is on "fun and food", you will attract people interested in "fun and food" rather than the other people who are more interested in improving productivity, advancing careers, networking within the company, etc. I would first try to find out why people aren't interested in the courses you give. My guess is that the top reasons are that they are not convenient given the worker's busy schedules, and that they don't seem worth the effort. By "worth the effort", I mean that the topic is either too broad or too narrow. For example, if you offer a course on Excel, it will probably be too broad in scope for the engineers (and therefore boring). If you specialize is about doing database type queries using Excel, it will be too narrow for the administrative assistants (and therefore boring).

I am a strong believer in web-based training because it allows you to overcome the problems related to convenience and scope (if done correctly). First of all is convenience. If the course is built so that the student can get to it any time they need it and so they can jump quickly to the topic of interest, it becomes more attractive to them. When they can get to the topic of interest in 3-4 clicks, their time on course will be 5-10 minutes, and they will have gotten what they needed. If you instead give them a bunch of 1 hour recorded PowerPoint slide shows, you will forever repel your audience from your course offering. People just don't have blocks of 1 hour to sit down and watch a narrated "PPT-mentary" about the topic you're trying to present, even if it has lots of flying bullets and dancing pigs. Additionally, content retention is typically 20-40% from the first presentation of the material. If it takes 1 hour to get to a specific piece of material, you are guaranteed that the learners will only visit it once. (Flying bullets and dancing pigs will ensure that the 20% they retain is about the dancing pigs.) If the material is really convenient, they will come back to it over and over. In the repetition, their knowledge retention will increase.

Secondly, structure your content so that it can reach different audiences based on their needs. Include pages with bullet points that give the highlights of the subject. On this page, add links to sub-pages that give the topic in more details. That way, if someone really wants to delve into it, they can. The sub-pages should provide alternate presentations: A screenshot simulation, a step-by-step table, an interactive simulation (e.g. Flash), a case study, a homework task, a quiz, a test. Each of these presentation styles will reach a different audience, thereby making your courses more attractive - people will be able to control their own learning.

Modularity and reuse

2008-02-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

Modular content can be reused most effectively when
a) it has such fine granularity (e.g. a sentence), that it blends in
well with the other content.
b) the re-user understands it thoroughly enough, including the context
in which it was written (by this point, they might as well have written
it themselves).
c) the re-user knows it exists

From my point of view, the content management paradigm is a solution
looking for a problem, pushed by vendors of database-driven systems. I
can see the case for reusing graphics and multimedia exercises (fed from
a repository), but the current craze about reusing textual content (and
about making one-page SCOs so that they can be put into a repository)
results in "ransom notes"; especially when the database system is
responsible for assembling the reused content.

What I do see that works well is when someone reuses someone else's
document or chapter when the necessary changes are small. For example,
most law offices don't rewrite every document from scratch. It makes
sense to re-use documents like wills, contracts, etc., that have evolved
over many years. Still, reuse requires that the re-user fully
understand the implications and subtleties of the document being reused;
otherwise, they may commit the customers to terms and conditions that
are undesirable.

What about reuse by the learner - e.g. they come back to it multiple
times or they view it on their browser, PDA, printed paper, etc.?

What to think about when deploying Web 2.0 technologies

2008-02-25T10:46:00.000-08:00

Before you "optimize eLearning" through the use of Wikis, Blogs,
PodCasts, video feeds, IMs, XML, SOAP, AJAX, and other "new"/"improved"
methods, it is really important to understand:
1. How can these "optimize eLearning"
2. How will you manage them
3. How will you measure success
4. How you will add the next "hot" technology
5. How will you prevent the system from becoming a garbage repository
that is first overwhelmed with everyone wanting to post their latest
thoughts on the lint residing in their bellies and then is ignored
because the only content it has is people's musings on belly lint?

Wikis: Will you have a librarian organizing posted content and verifying
that it is correct? How will you limit posting access so you don't get
some whacko (like me) uploading incorrect, opinionated, and possibly
insulting content?
Blogs: How will you take the word "I" out of people's postings (e.g,
"This is my first experience posting a blog, and I am really thrilled to
death about it") That is, how will you make the blog content useful as
an instructional element. If you go to the Brandon-Hall network, you'll
be amazed how many postings are of this character.
PodCasts: Will you have professional announcers recording things, or
will you subject your audience to amateur, scratchy, poorly organized
rantings? How will you ensure accessibility both in terms of iPod
ownership and ADA?
Other technologies: Do you understand the implications of these
mechanisms?

Have you thought about just creating good content that the audience
might be interested in reading and referencing?

Sco's and Print Paradigm

2008-02-22T11:38:00.001-08:00

I just had an online conversation with an experienced trainer who told me that a new colleague fresh from his MS ISD program says that the idea of different levels of objectives is print based and
passé in the on-line world. Of course I have an opinion on this:

In my opinion, there is nothing "print-based" about having multiple levels of objectives. The SCORM/AICC specifications does not preclude this. In fact SCORM 2004 would seem to encourage this with their concept of score roll-up.

Paradigms that are print-based would include:
1. Linear navigation in a course. When printed, you read documents from start to finish. With web-based, you
should be able to jump around based on your needs as a learner.
2. Absolute positioning of graphics/text. With print, you know what size paper it is going on, so it is nice to specify that the graphic should be 5.23 inches by 6.54 inches, and placed 1.23 inches from the top. With web-based ,you have no idea what browser size the student will use, or even if it will be on a computer/PDA/cell phone. Therefore, with web-based, as the designer, you have to be open to flexible layout, and even run-time modifications of layout.
3. Modules are visited once. When you have a print-based test, once the person has filled it out, they can't fill it out again. The documentation goes on the shelf. With web-based, they should be able to return to the content whenever they want. In fact, if you place a search engine on your course, you will see more re-usability from the learner's perspective (that is, they re-visit the content for just-in-time-learning).

So, following these ideas of analysis, having multiple levels of objectives would be much more forward looking. Flat hierarchies are a print-based concept (how many web sites have you seen that consist of only one long page, or you have to read in a specific order?)

My observation about the "vogue" today is that there is great emphasis on the "look" of the course (animation, pretty pictures, links to Nike commercials, link to a social network site) rather than on the organization of the content. Course appearance is a much simpler concept to understand than instructional organization, so that is what a larger segment of the population emphasizes. However, crap dressed up in pretty finery is still crap! Well organized, usefull material, even if it doesn't use the latest in action-script will still produce good ROI.

getting started - do you want to use Freeware?

2008-02-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

Typically, open-source/freeware contains about 80% of what one needs (the easy 80%). The other 20% of what one needs typically takes 90% of the development work. So, if a vendor offers the consulting service, and you sign up for it, you will be their customer for a long, long time (and they will make lots of money off your generosity). Unfortunately, I have even seen many commercial packages (e.g LMSs, LCMSs) that also fall into this category.

My suggestion is to start with a basic web site. I wouldn't look for a
single source solution. The market is evolving too quickly. However,
when you do choose components, make sure that you will be able to export
your content in a format that can be edited/manipulated outside the
particular Wiki/authoring system/blog that you have used. Otherwise,
you'll be trapped. The technologies are generally so modular that you
can add/remove them from your site without concern about breaking the
rest of the site.

I would concentrate first of all on how you will create content that
will be accessed (and desirable) to the community. Next, figure out
what learner interactions you wish to track. From here, you will get a
good idea of how to proceed next. If you put a search engine on your
web site, you suddenly have a knowledge management system (as long as
the content you created is searchable). Add a bulletin board, and you
can have threaded discussions. Add a chat room software package and you
can have "office hours". If you take a look at http://www.readygo.com/
you can get a good idea of how to structure content so that it is
accessible/searchable, etc.

Community Based eLearning

2008-02-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

I believe that Community Based eLearning is a positive addition to a training environment. I think that when instituting community based eLearning. It is important that someone should ensure that the content has instructional value. If
someone posted an advertisement about cars in a newsgroup, the
moderator could (and should) prevent it from being widely broadcast. If I received hundreds of inappropriate e-mails from a newsgroup, I would apply my own level of censorship, and un-subscribe myself. That is precisely why I recommend some
filtering - so that the eLearning site does not become repulsive to its
audience.

A properly set up site that allows unfiltered posting should have a blog
area for first timers, and this should not be the principal area of the
site. Frankly, I no longer read the main general discussion area on the
BH network site because it is so unfiltered, and it takes too much
effort to find the useful opinions from among the "I'm thrilled to do
this..." postings.

I have already signed up as a volunteer for several discussion groups
about Rapid eLearning and Practical eLearning. Wouldn't it make
more sense for your B-H experts who wrote the reports on the new
technologies (and seem to advocate adoption) be in a better position to
guide these discussions (and could simultaneously recommend purchase of
their reports)?

I much prefer a newsgroup style of discussion simply because
responses are pushed to my desktop via e-mail. I can read them when I
want, and respond in near-real time if I can. It is a more
"event-driven" system. I don't use a newsgroup if they require that I periodically log
in and review the entire site to find out what is new. I don't have any interest in reading "this is really great" or "thanks for this information" type additions.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous training

2008-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

The big difficulty I see is the concept of taking a face-to-face
presentation approach, and just delivering it over the web. That is,
turning your in-class delivery into an over-the-internet approach. You
can indeed keep your presentations "synchronous", but you could also consider expanding them for "asynchronous" delivery.

Synchronous delivery does work effectively if:
1. Everyone has a good network/audio connection
2. Everyone is NOT at their own desk. That is, you can ensure that the
audience is not multitasking and answering their e-mails
3. Everyone speaks your language at the same proficiency level,
including slangs and idioms
4. Everyone can allocate the 1-20 hours for which you will be presenting

I believe the real power of eLearning (as with the real power of Google
search) is that the material can be available whenever the learner is
available (asynchronous), rather than only when the instructor is
available. If you restructure your content (giving multiple
presentations of the same material using different approaches), give
good nonlinear navigation (so the audience can go where they want rather
than where you want), make the material light (so it delivers quickly,
and does not require special computer reconfigurations), and several
other modifications, you'll be able to reach a larger audience not
constrained by time schedules, not overwhelmed by prerequisites that
aren't possessed, bored by material that is already possessed.

If you plan to continue giving synchronous training only, my suggestions
are:
1. Give the training to several people sitting in the next room, and
every hour or so, find out what they like/don't like.
2. Have one of those people give the training - you need to be the
audience too, in order to experience what the audience sees.
3. Try checking your e-mail, answering your cell phone, talk to your
boss, etc. while you are an audience member. How easy is it to
re-engage with the presenter?

a few things to think about for Synchronous training

2008-02-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

The main point I want to advocate is that when your audience is at a
distance, you will get much less nonverbal feedback, even if you use
audio. This is where a good presenter can shine by asking the leading
questions. With chat you can still do this, and you can reduce the
effects of accent and idiomatic differences. Also, chat requires much
less bandwidth, so now you can include a larger audience.

My experience is that requirements for live audio and live video usually
exclude about 40% of the potential audience. When I have tried live
audio, there is usually one participant that will require 45 minutes of
individual support to get their computer working.

Think about it - is online different then classroom

2008-01-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

A big problem with online training is that people are not
really modifying their approach to fit the new media. I've given this
analogy before, but it bears repeating. Have you seen clips of early
television? They had cameras trained on a symphony orchestra playing
music, followed by cameras trained on radio announcers reading stories.
This was television's effort to move to the new medium with as little
modification as possible. Many people felt that it was not worthwhile
to buy televisions because they didn't provide more than radios. So why
do you want to move your live training to the internet? If cost is not
an issue, the participants should be happy to travel to your location
and match your schedule. However, I still know lots of companies that
are budget conscious - I just want more people to have access to training.

Thinking about SCORM

2008-01-15T20:35:00.000-08:00

People have interpreted SCORM for more than what it can do. The
underlying assumption regarding SCORM seems to be that you are using an
LCMS and that you want to do output-side reuse (rearranging existing
compiled content rather than recompiling the course). Frankly, this
will not work. How many times do you take printed documents (especially
with each line already numbered) and physically cut/paste them to create
a new document? Taking the built course modules and trying to cut/paste
them into a new course is exactly the same process.

Reusability works when you can create a new document based on previous
assets. I am using the word "assets" because this is the SCORM term
used in SCORM 2004. I think the "asset" idea for sharing is much more
sensible than the SCO idea. There are assets that you may want to use
among several SCOs (e.g. a multi-page glossary, a page of FAQs, a single
graphic). This concept was missing from SCORM 1.2. Reuse among courses
should generally be done at the asset level, rather than at the SCO level.

The tool I work with (ReadyGo) is designed so that you can easily re-use
a sub-page, a page, a chapter, an entire course, a FAQ page, an
individual test question, a look-and-feel template, a glossary, a
certificate template, a tracking configuration, etc. Notice that
"look-and-feel" and "tracking configuration" can and should be re-usable
and transferable independently of the content. While not technically
"content", the content would be un-usable (or just basic text) without
them, and they should be viewed as components of the course equivalent
to text or individual graphics.

The re-use process consists of selecting of copy/pasting from one course
to another within the authoring tool from the outline view (or as
Christie mentioned, from the TOC). Then, you regenerate the course,
thereby creating content with a consistent look and feel, consistent
page numbering, a new table-of-contents, etc. (In ReadyGo, the
appearance is generally separate from the content, thereby allowing much
greater re-use.) With an LCMS approach, re-use consists of rearranging
components that are already built, possibly using different authoring
tools, different appearances, etc. This can easily result in disjointed
"ransom note" courses.

The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original
purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled)
content from one LMS to another; not from one COURSE to another, or from
one authoring tool to another. Right now they are caught between trying
to ensure that a course will work well on any LMS (therefore, it pretty
much has to be static) and the Web 2.0 concepts of content aggregation
in real time from multiple sources (thereby breaking LMS-independence)
Note that the LCMS approach may even be negative - can you move your content from one LCMS to another, or to another LMS, even as already-built SCORM modules?

People are much more efficient when they use input-side reusability
(prior to generating/printing - as exemplified by desktop applications)
rather than output-side (LCMS SCO reuse/physical paper cut/paste).
Otherwise, we'd see a lot more adoption of server-based presentation
(equivalent to MS-PPT), document (equivalent to MS-Word), spreadsheet
(equivalent to MS-Excel), project tracking (equivalent to MS-Project)
tools with output-side reusability.

Outsource vs in-house

2008-01-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

Since the dawn of Data Centers IT managers have wrestled with the question: Should I bring the application in house or should I pay monthly fees for someone else to manage it. This age old problem is even more important then ever. Software companies have embraced managing software for their customers. In the old days this was called "timesharing" today it may be called SOA (Software as a Service), Hosted Solution, or Application Service.

Outsourced/Service: The advantage of this approach is less setup. Disadvantages include potentially high total cost (if done on a per-user basis), limited access to result data and potential lack of security (because data is hosted on someone else's server).

In-House Hosted:Advantages include a fixed software price, more control over look and feel, and "total control" over result data. More setup is required with this approach but the process is faster because the author does not need to do everything through a browser.

New technolgies and eLearning

2008-01-09T11:45:00.000-08:00

New technolgies represent a very powerful way of doing things. A good application that shows the power is Google suggest. "As you type, the browser goes back to 'Google' and gives you suggestions as to what is available to fill in."

The main problem with new technologies found in Web 2.0, is that they are solutions in search of a problem to solve. "The SOAP/AJAX technology solves the problem that if someone fills in a blank on a form, you may want to give him feedback (from a remote server) without reloading the entire Web page. Basically, it lets just one part of the form be updated based on information that is retrieved from a server in real-time. This is only really needed if you can't incorporate the information into the Web page when it is being delivered to the student. So, you could create a single page, for example, that gives results from various search engines as the user inputs information into one field."

The biggest downsides are ...

In order to develop content that uses this, you need to be a "power programmer." You need to be able to code the Web pages to use the AJAX approach (basically, each piece of your Web page can go off to a different server and ask for information when the user clicks, mouses over or types in that piece of the Web page); you need to be able to write and debug the server-side component(s) that provide the information; and you need to make sure that these behave nicely.

Not all browsers support this type of architecture yet. In the newer versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, you have to use an ActiveX component. This opens you up to security issues. (The AJAX ActiveX component doesn't, but allowing ActiveX does because an ActiveX component can do anything to your computer once it is allowed.) Older browsers won't handle it, so you need to make sure your page "appears well" with older content.

If you are going to provide services, you will need to publish a description of your interfaces so that the power programmers can use them. You'll also need to ensure that there is no way to breach the security of your "services."

If you can find good applications that require the communication/feedback in almost real time -- that AJAX provides -- you may find that traditional approaches will work just fine."

Using ReadyGo to turn content SCORM Complient

2008-01-07T09:54:00.000-08:00

I have been asked by a number of organizations the following: "We are searching for an editing/creation tool that will allow us to transfer our raw content into a SCORM-compliant module that we can then give to our partners for their LMSs. We are looking for an 'off-the-shelf' application that can be purchased."

If the user is able to copy and paste existing content, you should consider ReadyGo Web Course Builder (price is $499 per developer). The software is template-driven -- thereby providing "inherent instructional design" and freeing the course developer from extensive visual layout work (without losing the flexibility of implementing proper Web layouts).

With a simple menu selection, courses can be regenerated for AICC (about 15 different variations already created), SCORM (about 20 different variants based on different LMS capabilities available), no tracking, e-mail based tracking, or tracking through ReadyGo's Server Side Testing module. Depending on the in-house custom LMS interface, it might even be possible to add an interface to that system cost-effectively."

Technology used to create web pages

2007-12-17T12:35:00.000-08:00

I think people are talking about technologies without looking into the using them and even more importantly, having learners access the pages created by them.

Presently HTML is king when it comes to a language used to create web pages. I think HTML's limitations has some advantages, specifically making it accessible to more people. for example this is a an easy way for SMEs to create web courses. Actually,
HTML by itself isn't used by SME's, but authoring tools that
create it does. Then, there are other tools like Google Docs,
FrontPage, & DreamWeaver that can easily edit what the authoring tool has
created (if there is a need for that).

XML is being used more often for display of content, and that is
fine. Likewise, it is being used more frequently for data storage, and
that too is good. However, simultaneous use of an XML document for both
display and for data storage seems extremely difficult and what would
be the point of doing this?

XSLT (style sheets and display for XML) is and will be very useful for what it is intended to do. I don't know what tools actually do the XSLT translation?
For example, browsers can display HTML and XML, and different parsers
can read/parse XML. If you use an XML parser, you still have to program
the interpretation and use of the parsed data, and that is fine because
now there is a more accessible file storage format. With XSLT, what
creates the output file?

LMS update - what they can can & can't do

2007-12-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

Based on my last post I got some questions on that status of LMS's. Some of my information is a little dated, but here is what I can bring up-to-date.

1. Aspen: SumTotal has several LMS offerings including "Docent", "Voyager", and "Aspen". Of these, I have only seen that "Aspen" has the interactions and objectives support.
2. IBM: Yes, they keep changing names. The last time I saw things with their system was about 2 years ago. I think what I saw later became Lotus Learning Space, but this is conjecture.
3. Oracle: The Oracle iLearning, which is now "OLM" would be the most complete offering to look at from Oracle. I only recommend Oracle for companies that already have other Oracle financial systems already installed. As with any LMS, the cost of the LMS is only a small fraction of the total cost of ownership. The bulk of the cost is the integration of the LMS's database with any existing personnel system. If Oracle is already available at the organization, then adding their LMS is cost-effective. My experience with the other systems you mentioned that are now owned by Oracle is that their data support for the eLearning standards were minimal at best.

I have seen many other LMSs (including other "big" ones) that were purposely omitted from my list because they do not support for interactions and objectives. In some cases, delivering interactions even caused the LMSs to throw exceptions. Unfortunately this occurred on some well known brand-name LMSs.

As you observed, the "big" LMS vendors seem to have less to offer than some of the smaller ones. My experience has been that some of the smaller ones have much better technical support, better technical implementation, and better customer support. Among the big ones, Oracle impressed me, but that was at least 3 years ago. For those of you who would like to know my qualifications to make these statements, I work on the LMS integration for ReadyGo. We have an authoring tool that creates AICC or SCORM conformant packages. In the course of doing this, we have integrated with dozens and dozens of LMSs. What we have seen is that each LMS has their own interpretation of the specifications, especially with AICC. With SCORM, there are fewer interpretations, but there are still behaviors and limitations imposed in the LMS that can affect the learner experience. We have made ReadyGo open enough that it is possible for us to create "LMS-packs". These are analogous to printer drivers. When you go to generate (print) your course, you can choose what LMS or specification you want it to work with like you would choose a printer. This allows the course to report as much information as possible to the LMS without causing the LMS to interfere with the learning experience. For example, some LMSs are set up so that once the student completes the course, they are not allowed to take it again. When customers don't like the one-time-only use of courses, we can set up the LMS-pack so that the course never reports a completion status. Then, the LMS doesn't block the learner from re-using the content. The learning level of the student could be passed, for example, through the score. So that is why I feel that I can provide my opinions on LMSs.

My greatest frustration has been that most LMSs and, as a result, most authoring tools have gone for the minimum necessary to be able to put "SCORM Conformant" on their sales brochures. You can see this when the authoring tool only offers one "AICC" and/or one "SCORM" output option. Course developers have then had to rearrange their courses or just forget about tracking anything more than course completion. This has crippled the true capability of SCORM and AICC, and has resulted in "junk food" courseware as the norm.

SCORM and SCO's

2007-12-14T09:42:00.000-08:00

Lots of LMS's and authoring tools limit their system by their limited reading of the SCORM specification and their limited implementation of SCO's. There is nothing in the SCORM specification that says that a SCO must be a single page of content. In fact, I believe it is a bad
design decision to make each page a SCO, but this appears to be the
group-think way of doing things. Here is my rationale: When you go from
SCO to SCO, the LMS has to close the previous SCO and then Launch the
next one. In some cases this means that the user must return to the
table of SCOs and manually launch the next one. That completely breaks
the learning flow.

Imagine that every time you want to see a new page of Google results you
have to go back to the start page, and re-input your search. That would
chunk your learning experience down into little pieces. And, we haven't
even addressed the delays most LMSs have in closing one SCO and
launching the next. I have seen delays as big as 20 seconds when going
from unit to unit, and this is on a DSL line.

If you want to see a tool that uses chapters or entire courses as a SCO,
you can take a look at the ReadyGo Web Course Builder.

One of the reasons that the "group-think" has gone with page=SCO is that
the majority of LMSs don't capture or report interactions and
objectives. This means that you can't get granularity of reporting
unless you have granularity of content. That is to find out if someone
answered a specific question correctly, you must use question=SCO.
Technically, it is easier to implement a single question on a web page,
but instructionally, I wonder if that isn't worse. In school, do
teachers hand out a single question, then pick it up, grade it, tell you
your grade, and then hand out the next one? I usually learned the
answers to one question by understanding another question on the test.
Since the objective should be training/teaching rather than measuring,
wouldn't it be better to use the pedagogical methods that have been
refined over centuries? Yes, we have new technologies available, and
these afford new opportunities, but it doesn't mean that we should
jettison older methods just because some 20-somethings with their cool
new iPods walking around with headphones believe they are the first to
ever do this, and thus anything the above-30s do must be trashed and
dis'-ed. (Does that stand for disregard, disparage, disagree, or all of
the above?)

Another tragedy of the minimalist LMS approach is that it becomes
impossible to use the LMS to carry out surveys and assessments. The
good news is that there are LMSs (Avilar, Oracle, MeridianKSI, IBM,
Aspen) that do capture and report interactions and objectives. So now,
there is hope that your LMS can be used to evaluate your course both
from the point of view of figuring out if the instructor is giving bad
questions and for the student to let you know their thoughts.

So, if you let a SCO be more than a single page, you can have the
summary as part of the SCO, and have the navigation/reusability, without
making compromises.

My rebuttle from an online article

2007-12-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

In the 13-February-2007 issue of OnlineLearning News and Reviews, Dr.
Patti Shank discussed how the "best" authoring tools for certain
organizations may be tools that convert Microsoft Office content to
web-viewable format. I believe that this approach is part of the
natural inclination to avoid/delay change, because change requires
learning new ideas. It is like early cars that used reins to steer.
MS-Office is an excellent suite of tools to create/manage data specific
to those tools. Word is good for creating letters and documents to be
printed. PowerPoint is good for creating talking points that help a
live presenter. Excel is excellent for storing/manipulating tabular
data. However, we don't use Excel to give presentations, or PPT to
create printed documents, although we certainly could.

Likewise, using PPT and Word to create on-line documentation is a misuse
of these products. Most people have these tools, but yet, there are
almost no web sites that are built using these tools. So why should
users settle for web courses that are built using these tools? The
answer appears to be that course authors find it convenient to do so
(irrespective of the learners' needs.)

I actually see that in the future we will be using web courses as the
backup documentation when we give live presentations. There are
tremendous advantages to doing this. A properly structured web course
gives you links on each main content page to additional resources.
(PPT does not.) So, in the middle of the presentation, if an audience
member asks you a question, you can go to one of these links where you
may have a simulation, step-by-step layout, or in-depth article about
the question they have asked. Of course, you wouldn't read the in-depth
article, but it may have a table with statistics to back up your points.

In terms of visual display (the main reason people use PPT), through the
use of style sheets you can make this content format nicely for multiple
purposes. Ahead of time, you can create several style sheets that work
best in different delivery settings (e.g. laptop computer, PDA, visually
disabled). The end-users can click on different links to the same
content. Each link can use a different style sheet. So, users
following along on their own computer can choose their own content
layout. This is especially useful if you are giving the live
presentation to remote sites.

After the session, the complete web course is still available for the
audience to review. If they didn't understand one of your talking
points, they can look at the links to more data, and find how you've
explained the points in more depth. By giving multiple presentations of
the same material, you can then improve the chances that they'll be able
to catch your concepts. Further, the author can give tracked test
questions, and can find out directly if the learners are understanding
the concepts.

Even more than this, users can come back to your content and they don't
have to go through the entire presentation in order to get to the pages
of interest. This means that the content can be used as reference
material as they are trying to accomplish a task ("just-in-time"
learning). Course authors have been concentrating or the term "re-use"
only from the authoring side of things. We really should be considering
re-use from the learner side, as the purpose of the training is to
facilitate the end-user rather than the course author.

New mechanisms like XML are just the underlying technologies that in the
end will allow the kind of re-use and shifts that are mentioned above.
So rather than hanging on to our old tools trying to find convoluted
ways to use them in the changing environment, content developers would
be well-served to start thinking about how the new capabilities for
content delivery will modify how they do their tasks, and what tools are
really "best" for them, and more importantly, their audience.

Building an effective learning community

2007-12-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a sampling of the ingredients one needs to build an effective learning community.

A good story. You need to have the basic ingredient of a community, which is a common interest shared by many people. Start with a good set of content (courses, discussions, resources) so that people have a foundation upon which they can build and participate.

Self-interest. There has to be a benefit for the participants, and that benefit has to be self-evident. Why should people cooperate and spend time working on the "community" when it distracts them from doing the 50 million other tasks that are assigned to them?

Critical mass. The community will only be self-regenerating once you have enough people actively engaged. Getting to this point is terribly difficult, and maintaining the activity can be difficult. One trick Moser has found to be helpful is to cause controversy. "This gets people more interested. The hard part is finding controversial subjects that are not insulting. For example? Discuss why you think one approach to solving the problem is better than another."

Ease of use. The slightest hurdle for people to participate either as contributors or as data receivers will turn people off from the experience. Stick to "best of breed" Web practices (e.g., easy navigation, fast download, staying away from heavy multimedia, using an effective search engine, and avoiding clutter). "You may need librarians and moderators to ensure that the site doesn't get cluttered with 15 versions of everyone's documents and that the discussions don't get hijacked by a few individuals."

Culture. If there isn't a culture of sharing or of informal learning in your organization, you won't be able to create one just by using a social network software site. "People have to feel that there is no downside to participating in the activity. Management has to support it. (Good luck!) And management has to participate, also."

Luck. This is by far the most important ingredient, says Moser. "You can have all the ingredients, but there is that intangible thing about luck that probably comprises 60 percent of the deciding factor as to whether the site will mushroom, die, or hobble along. But just because it hobbles along doesn't mean you should give up. Luck can come along at any time." A new person may join the organization and spice up the discussions, for example, prompting people to be drawn in. "Why is YouTube more popular than Yahoo! videos or Google videos? Mostly luck. There were many other video sites that were comparable and available at the same time. YouTube got lucky."

TRAINING IN AN ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

2007-12-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

If your goal is to train engineers, my recommendation, as an engineer, is to stay away from the "more interactive" (also known as "more entertaining") approach that uses video, audio, and hot-zone mouse-overs. Contrary to what has been advertised, video and audio are actually very passive forms of training. We have seen that if you include an audio in a course (as an adjunct to slides), the learner often abandons the visual portion (since they are receiving audio) and drift to check their e-mails or other tasks they need to do. The result of this is that their focus on the learning is reduced, and eventually lost. Only 10% of material is learned through audio. Keep this in mind.

Engineers have been trained to be able to learn from visual content (primarily math and physics with lots of equations). We (engineers) are accustomed to both quick learning (by looking up a formula) and in-depth learning (understanding how the formula was derived). A video can provide an example of the concept, but will generally not provide fundamental engineering concepts.

True interactivity involves changing behaviors based on the student's response. The simple form of this is to provide the learner with multiple expositions of the same material accessed through links on a page. These expositions could include a step-by-step table, a link to a journal article, a formula derivation, a practical example of the implications of the formula, a quiz, a tracked test. The more complex form of interactivity (which is much more expensive) is a true-to-life simulation, such as Flight Simulator. People should really question what is interactive about a hot-zone mouse-over. If you are training people how to move a mouse, this is a good simulation; however, if the purpose is to teach some other concept, it becomes "eye-candy" (and can be very distracting). Every graphic, audio, video, hot-zone, or other non-text element should be carefully scrutinized and justified. Does it convey new information? Does the student's action relate to the content, or is their action simply a display control?

My recommendations: A good "book" layout will be most effective at training engineers. An instructionally sound "book" approach is more than a series of linked slides with a table of contents on the sidebar. Each "page" of content should include links to sub-pages with different expositions of the same material, since each learner will gain differently from each presentation. The material should be easily accessible, meaning that at any time when the employee is doing their job, they can use the "course" as reference material to look up the procedure or formula. If the course is designed as a one-time, linear set of content, you lose this possibility. If you can put a search engine on your site, and the content is properly searchable, you will create a re-usable resource that the engineers will quickly adopt as part of their "library" of knowledge.

Accessability (working with blind readers)

2007-11-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

The main "new technologies" for improved accessibilities are the browser extensions such as blind readers. These work best when content is built in HTML because it is presented as text. When courseware is built in Flash or Java, while it has nice animation capabilities, it is NOT accessible to blind readers.

Many developers have added audio to their courses in order to satisfy the accessibility for visually impaired users. However, this can actually be a disservice. Blind users usually set their blind readers to speak at about 3 times the normal rate since they have to receive all data in a serial manner. If they have to depend on a narrator (often non-professional), the content is fed to them way too slowly. If, however, the content is built using HTML and following best practices (see http://www.readygo.com/index.htm?start_file=sup03/10sup03d.htm) a blind reader can then read this at whatever rate the user has established.

Following good web design practices has additional benefits for users without disabilities:
1. Content can be searched using a search engine, so that users can get to the content of interest more quickly.
2. The content can be delivered to different size screens (you don't have to established a fixed window size)
3. The content can be delivered to other devices such as PDAs and cell phones
4. The end-user can set their own preferred font size/color (through their browser configuration), and they are not forced to read the designer's preferred 8 point light gray font, when the smallest they are able to read is 16point. Also, if they have very high resolution monitors, an 8 point font can be tiny.
5. Content actually downloads faster.
6. Content is chunked in such a way that it can be re-used more easily.

The current move to deliver content as Flash-style movies is good for visual animation features, but is bad for accessibility. Also, for sighted users, the visual animations can serve as bad distractions when they are trying to read the content. A focus on the end-users experience (rather than boosting the designer's portfolio) generally results in more accessible and reusable content.

How to handle learners who don't like your course

2007-11-26T12:53:00.000-08:00

A negative attitude from an audience is feedback that can be used to make a course better. If you get a negative reaction from your audience I recommend that you start with by trying to figure out why they have a negative attitude.

My guess is that their experience has been more tailored to the courseware authors' desires than to the learner's desires. That is, the course authors decided what would be
interesting for the learner, and presented this material. Since the
learners were required to take the training, they had no choice but to go
through the material as it was presented.

My suggestion would be to set up the training so that the learners can
choose when and how they view it. When you do a Google search, you get
to choose which links to follow. If you structure your content with
this in mind, you can make it more interesting (or at least less
annoying) to the employees. Most employees want to come in, get the
training as quickly as possible, and get out. So, break the content
down into 15-20 minute segments, and let the learner choose how they
want to see it.

For example, if you do a autoplaying slide show (PowerPoint converted to
the Web), the user has no control over the content. It is displayed at
the speed at which a presenter would narrate it. People can read 3
times faster (at least) than they speak. Also, PowerPoint slide format
(3 lines of text per page) are good as background material for a live
speaker. It is NOT a good format for self-paced learning. There is not
enough information simply in the slides. A good self-paced learning
format allows the employees with 20 years of experience, quickly review
and jump over the stuff they already know, and then they can go to the
"What's New" section. The new employee can go through all the pieces in
more detail. So give multiple tests in the course so that the employees
can evaluate themselves and re-review the material if they don't know
it. If they know the material, let them get done with the training in 5
minutes, if that is all they need.

My recommendation is to
only use multimedia (and other passive elements) when absolutely
necessary. This allows the learner to get through the material on their
time and on their schedule, and they start having a more positive
experience because THEY now have control over the learning session.

Why turning your training into one big video is not a good idea

2007-11-19T14:24:00.000-08:00

Recently I have received quite a few calls from customers interested in
using video to do their web-based training. Typically, their concept is
to provide PowerPoint bullet slides alongside their video with
narration. They'd like a tool that can do this, synchronize everything,
and then give a test at the end of the session.

Here are a few thoughts about why the above scenario is a bad way
to go about distance-based training:
1. Length of Video: If you go to YouTube, currently the most successful
on-line video site, you'll find that most of the popular videos are
shorter than 2 minutes. Occasionally, you'll find some that are close
to 5 minutes, but these are the exception. This is a strong lesson for
training. People's attention span to watching content on their
computers is 2-5 minutes. After 2 minutes, many people will drift away,
check their e-mail, work on the latest task their boss gave them, etc.
If you plan to give a 30 minute video, break it up into segments that
are no longer than 2-3 minutes.
2. Narration: Only 10% of the information we learn is via audio (statistic from some PBS documentary). But yet, many people are using PowerPoint presentations (which are clearly incomplete as a self-paced training material) augmented by narration.
They are leaning heavily on the audio to "complete" the skeleton/bullet
points provided by PowerPoint. Think about it...your slides that only
contain 20% of the information necessary for giving the complete
material are being "completed" by a mechanism that only gives 10%
retention. Further, our customers have observed that when courses have
audio, the learners drift away from the visuals (and start checking
e-mail etc.) since the content is being spoon-fed to them. Sometimes
having both audio and visuals is sensory overload, so the reader naturally blocks out one of them (usually the textual/visual content.) Further, in many settings, having audio turned on will distract co-workers, and using headphones is not allowed (e.g. nurses in an open area).
3. Delivery: Videos can be very fickle about whether they will play or
not. The student must have the correct version of the plug-in with the
right codecs (codes to display the video) installed on their computer.
If they don't, they won't see the video. We have seen the best results occur if you convert your video (.mpg) files to Macromedia/Adobe Flash files (.swf). Most people have Flash installed on their computers, and fewer IT departments will block them.
4. Synchronization: When delivering separate pieces of content from the web, synchronization is very difficult. Each multimedia element will download and arrive at a different time. If you need very tight synchronization, you need to embed all the synchronized content into a single file/stream. Unfortunately, this means a longer download time. Users get very impatient and will abandon content if it does not download within 20 seconds and start playing. If it is in one stream/file, you have just taken navigation control away from the reader. Good web sites provide multiple avenues to explore the material. A single "movie" narrows this to just one outlet.
5. Give your reader control: Successful web sites like Google provide the information to the reader so that they can select what to see next when they are ready. Recorded presentations provide the information sequenced as the narrator would like it, and delivered at the narrator's rate. We have seen learners fast forward over the content and just get to the mandatory test at the end. In cases where they couldn't fast-forward, they just walked away from their computers until the video was over, and then they took the test. That is, in neither case, did they watch the video, that was so expensively created.
5. You're not George Lucas: Video requires a good story, professional actors, and professional production; otherwise it looks like a home-made slide show. I have been at some companies that could afford very expensive video productions, and even the best productions bored me to death. Corporate training does not typically have good character development, striking cinematography, and award-winning musical accompaniment. People's expectations regarding video are very high, and unless you can meet those, your readers will disparage your effort.

My rule is that every bit of motion/animation must be justified: Does it add vital informational content or is it just decoration? If it is more "decoration" make sure your boss agrees that the it is necessary for improved return on investment.

So my recommendation is to break up the video into short segments hosted on separate web pages or preferably, avoid it entirely in exchange for more text-based content. Make startup of the video optional so that the user can play/replay when they want to. Place tests/quizzes and other content (especially printable articles) between the videos so that the user has something they can reference, and to force the user to really go through the content. Make test question content context sensitive to the material that is important; however, don't force the reader to watch the video, especially if they already know the material. Otherwise, you will quickly gain an enemy from the experienced users who have been required to take the course.

A bad way to go about creating distance-based training

2007-11-14T14:06:00.000-08:00

. But yet, many people are using
PowerPoint presentations (which are clearly incomplete as a self-paced
training material) augmented by narration.
They are leaning heavily on the audio to "complete" the skeleton/bullet
points provided by PowerPoint. Think about it...your slides that only
contain 20% of the information necessary for giving the complete
material are being "completed" by a mechanism that only gives 10%
retention. Further, our customers have observed that when courses have
audio, the learners drift away from the visuals (and start checking
e-mail etc.) since the content is being spoon-fed to them. Sometimes
having both audio and visuals is sensory overload, so the reader
naturally blocks out one of them (usually the textual/visual content.)
Further, in many settings, having audio turned on will distract
co-workers, and using headphones is not allowed (e.g. nurses in an open
area).
3. Delivery: Videos can be very fickle about whether they will play or
not. The student must have the correct version of the plug-in with the
right codecs (codes to display the video) installed on their computer.
If they don't, they won't see the video. We have seen the best results
occur if you convert your video (.mpg) files to Macromedia/Adobe Flash
files (.swf). Most people have Flash installed on their computers, and
fewer IT departments will block them.
4. Synchronization: When delivering separate pieces of content from the
web, synchronization is very difficult. Each multimedia element will
download and arrive at a different time. If you need very tight
synchronization, you need to embed all the synchronized content into a
single file/stream. Unfortunately, this means a longer download time.
Users get very impatient and will abandon content if it does not
download within 20 seconds and start playing. If it is in one
stream/file, you have just taken navigation control away from the
reader. Good web sites provide multiple avenues to explore the
material. A single "movie" narrows this to just one outlet.
5. Give your reader control: Successful web sites like Google provide
the information to the reader so that they can select what to see next
when they are ready. Recorded presentations provide the information
sequenced as the narrator would like it, and delivered at the narrator's
rate. We have seen learners fast forward over the content and just get
to the mandatory test at the end. In cases where they couldn't
fast-forward, they just walked away from their computers until the video
was over, and then they took the test. That is, in neither case, did
they watch the video, that was so expensively created.
5. You're not George Lucas: Video requires a good story, professional
actors, and professional production; otherwise it looks like a home-made
slide show. I have been at some companies that could afford very
expensive video productions, and even the best productions bored me to
death. Corporate training does not typically have good character
development, striking cinematography, and award-winning musical
accompaniment. People's expectations regarding video are very high, and
unless you can meet those, your readers will disparage your effort.

My rule is that every bit of motion/animation must be justified: Does it
add vital informational content (e.g. shows a trajectory) or is it just
decoration (your boss wants to be the star of his own video)? If it is
more "decoration" make sure your boss agrees that the it is necessary
for improved return on investment.

So my recommendation is to break up the video into short segments hosted
on separate web pages or preferably, avoid it entirely in exchange for
more text-based content. Make startup of the video optional so that the
user can play/replay when they want to. Place tests/quizzes and other
content (especially printable articles) between the videos so that the
user has something they can reference, and to force the user to really
go through the content. Make test question content context sensitive to
the material that is important; however, don't force the reader to watch
the video, especially if they already know the material. Otherwise, you
will quickly gain an enemy from the experienced users who have been
required to take the course.

More thougths on eLearning derailment

2007-11-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

One source of the derailment of eLearning has been the prevalence of "solutions looking for problems", i.e. vendor and committee products designed to capture the market. The eLearning decision makers have been driven into purchasing expensive LMS systems without a clear concept of what they are to achieve and without a single course to deliver. I see it over and over where eLearning consumers tell us that they're not yet interested in purchasing an authoring system because they are implementing their LMS (usually a 2-3 year process). This is like building a highway system without ever having owned a car or truck. (A simple web site could actually meet all their initial needs.)

Many corporate issues can be solved by basic Web 1.0 techniques. Course content should be reachable at any time. It should be searchable. This way, when a worker needs to look up some definition, they can go to the "training" web site, do a search on the term, and see the multiple courses that relate to that content. Then, they can jump to the page(s) with the content. All this in a couple of minutes. If the course authors want tracking, that can easily be done without any fancy expensive LMS system.

From what I have seen, the approach that the analysts and much of the community encourage is what we could call a "Web 0.5" or a pre-web approach. This involves simulating the face-to-face training as closely as possible:
1. Content consists of presentation slides converted to some web-deliverable format without any consideration of instructional effectiveness.
2. Student sessions have a fixed start and a fixed finish, with a single test session (one question per page) at the end that can be passed or failed. Random access to the middle of the content is discouraged.
3. The objectives from the instructor's point of view are to deliver the material with the least possible change and to track (maybe) that the student has "completed" their training.

Until this paradigm can be replaced with a more web-like approach, we'll be stuck with federally mandated obsolescent specifications like SCORM, and ROI for eLearning will consist mostly of empire building by the managers who purchase these expensive systems.

Problem Looks for a Solution or is it a Solution looking for a Problem

2007-11-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

I think that the best products out there are ones where the designer identifies a problem and comes up with a better solution. From here, sprouts a product that provides innovation. In the case of the "meeting of minds", I believe we are all seeing that the need is to produce and deliver effective training for little money. Within that need, there are many effective ways of doing it. I think that one really good way of solving the problem is to use web-based techniques, starting with Web 1.0 techniques. Of course, Web 1.0 requires a "design pattern" to be applied to training/education, but the approach should use the "best of breed" of both instruction and of web technologies.

I tend to rant about "Solution looking for a Problem" primarily when I see design rationale that was applied as follows.
A. I know how to do X (e.g. build a database)
B. I can deliver training from X (e.g. a database)
C. I can sell X for lots more money than other solutions out there (e.g. a simple web server)
Therefore, a solution based on X is the best solution to training needs. If you're going to use a database, it should be because of your storage/retrieval/reporting needs.

Unfortunately, from my experience, the database delivery systems (aka LMSs) are also the strongest voices in the creation of the specification such as AICC and SCORM. Perversely, before SCORM 2004, the course was the component that had to do all of the navigation, calculation of completion, etc. whereas the Database was just a "memory" for the browser. Restated, the multi-million dollar server/database system just stored results from the course, while the FREE browser the course was being served in had to do all the calculations. Even though the course author could specify mastery score to the LMS, I never saw an LMS that tied the mastery score to the student's score to come up with a "Completion" report. For that matter, I have rarely seen a decent report from an LMS that provides a breakdown of how each question was answered by each student, and whether there was a problem with a specific test question.

I feel the same way about PodCasts and Wikis. They are good tools (Podcasts for disseminating information, Wikis/Content Management Systems for collaborative documentation), but calling them pure training is definitely a stretch ("Solution looking for a Problem"). That's what annoys me so much about the "big" analysts pushing these as the future of elearning. I see most of these technologies as good resources, not training.

The thought behind ReadyGo's SCORM implementation

2007-11-07T13:11:00.001-08:00

We realized early on that there was a difference between the specification (e.g. SCORM, AICC) and the "behavior" you want to experience. So we left our tool open to use different LMS-packs when the author creates the course. The author does need to contact us, but
we can produce a new behavior for $200-$500.

What does "behavior" mean? The combination of what the course reports
and what the server stores, and how the server acts based on the data is
what we call "behavior". For example, suppose your LMS forbids students
from retaking a course if they have completed it. In that case, if the
course reports the lesson status as "completed", the students will lose
access to it. To bypass this, the course could report "Passed" as the
status. Or, suppose your LMS overwrites previous status every time the
student retakes the test. In this case, the course has to check status
at the beginning of the course (not always possible), and would need to
ensure that it does not change the status from "completed" to
"incomplete" just because the student revisits the course.

By the way, in our current release of the ReadyGo authoring tool, we
have added a "custom" question type. You can use this to add your own
Flash or JavaScript. You hook up the results computed by your
Flash/JavaScript to the variables needed by ReadyGo, and the tool will
turn your custom interaction into a SCORM or AICC tracked element in the
test. Is this what you were looking for in your "I'd love to see" section?

ReadyGo has also pursued an alternative to LMS which is a
tracking/assessment engine. This uses basic web technologies to store
every test result every time the student responds. The data is stored
in Comma-Separated-

Variable text files (for portability). The web-based
reporting module has a group of reports. The look/feel is driven by
style sheets so that part is customizable. For users needing more
customization, we provide an Excel macro that will pull the results in,
and create the same reports. Since source code is provided, you can
then extend the reports using Excel as a simple database. If you have
dBase knowledge, of course, you can just pull the CSV files into your
database (first column = primary key), and you can create your own
queries. Since this module diverges from SCORM/AICC we can also do
things (easily for the author) like randomizing question and
answer/distratctor order. Also, the user can access all the course
content without needing to re-login every time. That is what I
previously alluded to regarding Web-technologies rather than
face-to-face-ported-to-web.

Canned Courses

2007-10-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

I've seen many times when a company spend a large sum on canned courses and there is almost no usage. A statistic one of our customers gave us was it cost them $150 per module completed. Each course they purchased consisted of many modules, meaning that they got very poor return on investment.

I believe the problem is that many canned courses purchased as a block of courses are not pertinent to the employees. As an analogy, how many purchased PowerPoint presentations are you using? Why not? My answer would be that the benefit of PowerPoint based training is that you deliver content that is specific to your organization or outlook. Canned content cannot necessarily do that. This also applies to web based content.

If management continues to view employees as (using the Air Force term) "Line Replaceable Units" or "LRUs", they will get what they pay for.

Regarding "extracurricular" activities, it is an interesting irony that people are so interested in using video and podcasts for training but yet want to block youtube and iTunes using the corporate firewall. If the content is interesting, or the employee feels some gain from doing it, they will take the courses (or watch the videos). If management and trainers have to push it on the workers, the knowledge retention will be much lower. Likewise, any impediment to taking the training (e.g. having to go through 3 login screens, having trouble getting the plug-in to work, annoying coworkers with audio) further reduces the chances of course usage.

By making the courses available at off-hours, but simultaneously offering the employee more flexible schedules, you can raise total productivity. If we treat employees as LRU's (or another term I like: "chimp-erators") the employees will remain that way. I have experienced that in most companies there is a breakdown as follows:
20% of the workers are high achievers who do 80% of the work.
60% of the workers treat it as a "job" - they keep their head down hoping they won't be noticed or fired. This group accomplishes 20% of the work.
20% of the employees are either completely useless or spend all their time playing politics to move up the corporate ladder.

eLearning will be most effective on the top 20% since they are self-motivated, and they pull most of the load. I don't have the answer for the other 80%.

Moving from training to performance support

2007-10-30T10:39:00.000-07:00

Course characteristics you can deploy to switch from "Training" to "Performance Support" might only entail:
1. Course design that invites the worker to jump into the middle of the
content (e.g. get away from linear presentation-style structure). Provide tables of contents so the user can get to any content in 3 clicks or less.

2. Content that is searchable (e.g. built in HTML/XML) rather than
Flash/Video. Put a search engine on your repository of course content,
and you now have a basic knowledge management system.
3. Testing throughout the content rather than just a final exam at the
end of a linear sequence.
4. Chunking the content into self-contained pieces (e.g a page with
sub-pages). Narration becomes somewhat less useful in this scenario.
5. Presentation of same content in different contexts (narrative, bullet
points, step-by-step printable procedure, video/animated procedure,
quiz, test, exercise).
6. Easy access: Move away from the LMS operations concept (Log in, take
a course, take a test, log out) to a web operations concept (Go to
company home page, search keyword, find/read page from course, possibly
take a test, read neighboring pages to get related information).
7. Move towards "courselets" or "Knowledge Pills" - courses should have
15 minutes of information rather than 15 hours.
8. Include a "what's new" section in any required course so that
experienced workers can skip the material they already know.

Who should have access to online training?

2007-10-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

Arguments that people should not have access to knowledge outside their
field seem ironic in an "education" or "training" discussion arena. One
great feature of eLearning is that it is so cheap to provide this
access, especially once the content is created. Making excuses like "they
don't have the time" or "they don't have the mental abilities" is
insulting, short-sighted, and could be viewed as illegal. But then
again, perhaps CEOs of companies should be exempted from sexual
harassment rules (and code of conduct policies) because they don't have
the time to take training courses.

Often, the truck driver is the only face-to-face interaction the
customer has with the vendor. If the truck driver wants to maintain
his/her job, and potentially earn a tip, knowledge of good sales
techniques and an understanding of the product he/she is delivering is
essential. Likewise, the salesperson should understand the restrictions
the truck-driver is under in order to not make promises the company
cannot meet. The same holds for engineers with respect to marketing,
etc., etc., etc. I have experienced an untrained truck driver
delivering a product. The photographic paper he delivered was tossed
around during delivery. This didn't cause visible damage to the outside
of the product, but photographic paper is pressure-sensitive, and the
damage did not become apparent until pictures were developed. This cost
both the vendor and the customer lots of time and money.

What's really in the SCORM spec!

2007-10-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

There is nothing in the SCORM spec that requires a FINAL assessment, or
any other kind of assessment. A course only needs to Initialize and
Finalize the session. It doesn't need to even report anything else.
That is why you will see tools that claim to be SCORM conformant, but
you author from Word, PowerPoint, Notepad, or MS-Paint.

Most authoring tools only have the concept of a FINAL assessment,
whereas you can actually have multiple assessments, surveys, etc. in
your course, and SCORM allows this. Many LMSs only store the minimum
SCORM data (score, status, time), so the authoring tools don't feel
compelled to push beyond. These LMSs tend to report even less about
each student. "Beyond" means including what the correct answer is, what
the student answered on every question, how long they took, how many
times they answered it, what they answered each time, etc.; information
that is useful for the course developer to know if they wrote good
questions. This probably explains why these tools only produce SCORM
packages if (and only if) you include a final assessment (and nothing else).

ReadyGo WCB will produce the SCORM package whether you include zero, one, or five hundred assessments.

What is Intuitive?

2007-10-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

More and more I am learning that the term "intuitive" is very loose.
What is intuitive to one person may be completely strange and unfamiliar
to another. This is especially true when instructional design and
software meet.

Something is "intuitive" if we have experience with something else that
is similar. If something is not "intuitive" then there is a real need
to have additional material to help it become "intuitive" to people.
The English language is very non-intuitive, but yet, native speakers
consider it completely intuitive. (For example, "gooder" would be the
natural extension of "good", but we use "better".)

Context-sensitive help is what I call a "Reference Manual" - you look up
details on a specific task. A tutorial is more of a "User's Manual" in
that it should offer procedural descriptions of the software's overall
functionality and approach. The "searchability" requirement can quickly
turn a well structured User's Manual into both a "User's Manual" and a
"Reference Manual". I find highly linear content like Video and Audio
distracting and uninformative, but then that is my learning style.

Training the Engineer

2007-10-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

Engineers are trained to learn from visual content (primarily math and physics with lots of equations). "We (engineers) are accustomed to both quick learning (by looking up a formula) and in-depth learning (understanding how the formula was derived). A video can provide an example of the concept, but will generally not provide fundamental engineering concepts."

True interactivity involves changing behaviors based on the student's response. The simple form of this is to provide the learner with multiple expositions of the same material accessed through links on a page. These expositions could include a step-by-step table, a link to a journal article, a formula derivation, a practical example of the implications of the formula, a quiz, or a tracked test.

In addition every graphic, audio, video, hot-zone, or other non-text element should be carefully scrutinized and justified. "Does it convey new information? Does the student's action relate to the content, or is the student's action simply a display control?"

My recommendation? A good book layout will be most effective for training engineers. An instructionally sound book approach is more than a series of linked slides with a table of contents on the sidebar. Each page of content should include links to sub-pages with different expositions of the same material, since each learner will gain differently from each presentation. The material should be easily accessible, meaning that at any time when the employee is doing his job, he can use the 'course' as reference material to look up the procedure or formula.

If the course is designed as a one-time, linear set of content, you lose this possibility. But if you can put a search engine on your site, and the content is properly searchable, you will create a reusable resource that the engineers will quickly adopt as part of their "library" of knowledge.

Why I think eLearning is sterile

2007-10-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

eLearning is currently sterile because a large percentage of the
practitioners and the "gurus"/analysts consider f2f (Face2Face) techniques as the
core for web instructional design. That is, if you can just bottle your
f2f presentation, and put it on the web (convert your PPT to Flash, add
narration, dancing pigs and flying bullets), you are now doing
"eLearning". It will take some time before the analysts stop looking in
the rear-view mirror when developing the advice they give their customers.

Trainers will need to see more examples of web based instruction (using
web techniques, rather than pre-Web methods) to start synthesizing what
will be successful for them.

Perhaps prototyping is a step in this direction. I recall having to
prototype presentation slides so that I could hand them to the graphics
department for creation. Is that the stage we're in for eLearning?
What changed the field for f2f presentations was that PowerPoint (such
as it is) was bundled into MS-Office 4.0, and now a large number of
office workers had this for free on their desktops. Unfortunately, as
the analysts have reported, MS has 85% (approx) of the eLearning market
simply through PPT, so they have no motivation to include a true
eLearning tool in their office suite. (I'd be happy to sell them
licensing for ReadyGo, so they can open up this field!)

So, until there is a major re-think of the "Office Suite" that also
includes web-site (and I don't mean "web-page") builders, and people
consider web training a subset of web-sites, eLearning will remain
stagnant, and will move in fits and starts. As it is now, the "graphic
designers" are responsible for implementation of web training (like it
was in the pre-Office 4.0 days for presentations), rather than the subject matter experts.

Thinkings on web delivery

2007-10-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

I believe that infrastructure is of interest to the course creator. 90% of the LMSs I have dealt with impose their own limitations/constraints on the user experience. That is, they have their own instructional design assumptions (e.g. once a student "completes" a course, they are locked out from revisiting it), and these assumptions impede learning. The course creator is going to be straight-jacketed by the LMS implementation (often involving the student having to open 5 or 6 browser windows just to get to their content), and it is essential that they understand the experience.

The current thinking seems to be that first you buy an LMS (at costs of US$50K-$1M), and then you start developing courses. This is like building a railroad system before you have a single locomotive. When you think about it LMSs are a subset of web servers. I'm talking to more and more people who are now starting to host their courses OUTSIDE an LMS because it affords them so much more flexibility. Gee, what a concept! Just use a basic web server (that you can get for free) to host your content. Now, your learners will get much more of a web-experience rather than a f2f presentation shoe-horned into web delivery technology.

Why I have issues with audio

2007-10-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

I have recived a number of comments on my postings about audio. I would like to make my postin clear. I am not against audio if used appropriately. My issue is with how many course authors use audio. I break the issue with audio into two groups 1) accessibility 2) instructional design

Issue #1 Accessibility:
1. Audio does not make a course accessible to blind readers. Blind people like their audio to be about 3 x faster then we speak.
2. Are your learners in cubes? If so, do they have speakers, do they have head phones - many employees can not listen to courses

My accessibilities issue is that many times audio makes a course less accessible

Issues #2 Instructional design
1. Because you give a good classroom course/presentation does not mean that voice annotating the same presentation will make it good.
2. In a classroom people are socially compelled to look like they are paying attention; at their desk they are not and may dive into their in basket if you play audio
3. Does the audio make the course boring? People only retain 10% of what they learn from audio.

Audio is fine in a course, but you need to defend why you have audio. If you put audio into a course because it will take less time to record audio then create a compelling eLearning course, you really should reconsider creating eLearning. Why should learners waist their time on a course you are too lazy to make compelling.

The difference between run-time reusability vs design-time (or assembly-time) reusability

2007-09-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

As a test, ask a friend of yours for their favorite PowerPoint presentation. Now grab your favorite PowerPoint presentation. Now, open them both in PowerPoint (but not in the same file). Present one. Immediately when you finish the first, show the second. Now, do they look like 2 presentations that were pasted together, or do they look like one continuous course?

Instead, take the content from the two presentations, put them into a single PPT file, and make sure that they are consistent in:
1. Look and feel: backgrounds, fonts, navigation, structure
2. Style: Text style, location of test questions, parallel structure of notes
3. Navigation text: This doesn't really apply to PPT, but with web sites/web courses you need additional labels and texts ("next page", "previous page", "grade the test", etc.) These need to be consistent throughout a single course, or the student will be very distracted.

Once you make sure these are all consistent, you can serve the content, and it will look smoother.

The difference here is whether you do run-time reusability or you do With eLearning if all you do is modify the style sheets at assembly time, you are not really using the SCOs unchanged.

I am a proponent of design-time or assembly-time reusability, and as you can tell, I don't like run-time assembly. More than that, I am a proponent of being able to re-use components of a SCO such as graphics, multimedia, pages, page groupings, test pages, etc. Some of these are what SCORM 2004 calls "assets".

A good tool will let you copy/paste content modules from various sources so that you can create a unified course. For example, suppose you want to number the SCOs so that the user knows at all times where they are. If you number them before assembly, and then you change the assembly order, the numbering will be incorrect. If you use content from different authors, it is important to make sure all the "stock" texts, navigation images, tables-of-contents, etc. are consistent. This is nearly impossible if you limit yourself to run-time re-usability.

In the web course process, there is the publish step. This is comparable to the print step with documents. During the publication step, you assemble your course for delivery. The way SCORM is designed, the publish step is more like grabbing multiple documents that have already been printed, and staple them together in a new order just prior to delivery. As opposed to printed documents that are linear, web courses are multidimensional with a "web" of interconnections. SCORM forbids the interconnections between SCOs. However, this does not prevent the author from giving the student clues about the interconnections between SCOs. For example, with the ReadyGo tool, if you choose to make each chapter of your course a SCO, the tool still builds a table of contents for the entire course that shows the other chapters but doesn't let you jump to them through the course. Within the chapter, the student is allowed to navigate anywhere.

If you design your SCOs so that the primary objective is re-usability, then you'll find that you're making them smaller and smaller, and more generic. You can entirely avoid the navigation issues by making each SCO a single-page object. You can also make tests so that each test is a separate SCO. (With many LMSs you must do this if you want to find out if a student understood a specific data item because they only store the score for each SCO.) However, I feel that these steps are bad for the end-user. When going from SCO to SCO, the LMS must close the current session and open a new session. The best turn-around I've seen for this is in the 5-10 second range. Typical delays are around 20 seconds. Any delay between pages of content will cause the learner to drift off the subject (and often they go check their e-mail or instant messages). So, the more granular your courses are (for re-usability) the slower the delivery and the more disjointed it will be for the learner. Now, if there are any visual disparities between the SCOs, these further disrupt the learning process.

So, yes, you can re-use SCOs at run-time. You will probably win some awards for your ability to use the SCORM, and you'll feel proud of yourself for creative re-use of content. But what about the learner's experience. Shouldn't that be the highest priority? If you alienate enough employees (with learning experiences that they dread), what's the point of re-usability?

What really is re-usability in eLearning

2007-09-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Someone who used to work at ADL labs pointed out to me that re-usability
should really go beyond just SCORM courses. You should be able to take
the same content and serve it without tracking. Or you should be able
to print out the content for those users who learn better from paper.
Also, you may want to re-use the content for people with visual
disabilities. So, it shouldn't just be about re-assembling 20 SCOs 50
ways to create 50 courses.

How can this be accomplished? I see 2 approaches:
1. At the tool level. Use a tool that contains your content. SCORM
courses are one of many different outputs that the tool can produce. It
could also produce, printable versions, AICC courses, non-trackable
versions, etc. You can copy paste between different courses or from
other sources and re-arrange content prior to course assembly.
2. Using XML/XSLT - but here, you're post-processing the course files,
basically passing them through another program to produce different
output. (That could get really tricky with the tracking scripts.)

I see run-time re-usability primarily for different delivery platforms.
You should be able to specify a different style sheet (at run time) so
that an end-user on a PDA can get an optimal format for them, and a
person with visual disabilities should get a good layout for their
needs. This is possible if you specify a style-sheet at run-time,
something the SCORM discourages.

Furthermore, re-usability should be from the learner's point of view.
Will the learner come back to the course and re-use it as a resource
(like a textbook)? Or has the content been designed for a one-time
event, like a face-to-face presentation? A learner may remember that a
certain procedure or fact was described in a course they took, but
they'll only re-use it if they can get to it quickly. 3 screens worth
of gateways just to get to the start of the course, followed by some
enforced navigation sequence will deter the user from using the content
as a resource.

Instructional design resource

2007-09-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

I just found a great eLearning blog: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/ Cathy is an Instructional Designer who has spent a lot of time figuring out the fine points of moving training to the web and showcasing how to effectively communicate asynchronously.

Views on Face-to-Face (F2F) videos:

2007-09-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

If your objective is to tape the face-to-face (F2F) presentations, and then deliver these as "eLearning", you will be quite disappointed in the results when it comes to learner retention. Although many people believe it to be "active" and "animated", video training is an extremely passive form of training, and results in very low knowledge retention. Further, people can read and ingest information about 3 times as quickly as is spoken. This means that unless the presenter is attractive, professional, and smooth, the viewers will quickly disengage. We have seen that videos that last more than about 2 minutes are abandoned quickly - this is even true for YouTube. Our customers have told us that they have also seen this behavior, and have found lower student satisfaction with video based courses than with simple text-and-picture based courses. We have also seen that because videos require plug-ins, many learners are unable to see them. An IT person usually has to be dispatched to install the plug-in software. By the time the learner then gets around to seeing the video, it can be 3 or 4 days later; by which time, they have lost interest in the courseware.

If you want to offer your employees self-paced training, consider creating more web-like content. This means that the content has tables of contents so that the student can establish their own navigation path that takes them to the material of interest. This becomes very "active" learning because the student is in control of the experience. If you provide them a self-propelled presentation or a linear slide show, you take control away from the learner. This usually results in the learner losing interest in the content.

Where does XML fit into eLearning?

2007-09-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

XML can be used as a display language when combined with style sheets.
You can then embed scripts to provide some level of dynamic/interactive
content. This would be like saying PostScript can be used to define how
a page is rendered. You can embed pictures so that they appear on the page.

XML is really designed as a data storage format. As such, people
typically put all the data into one file. This is similar to having a
Word document that has all the content in one document. However, when
viewing pages on the web, you should really have a "web" of documents.
If you save a Word document in web format, you get one long document.
You can have internal links that take you from one place in the document
to another, but you are still looking at one long page. Web sites
consist of collections of files, with each page of content consisting of
a separate (or several) files. These files could be built using XML, or
you could save some time by building them in HTML, which is
fundamentally a display language rather than a data storage format.
Please convey this in your white-paper so that people will get away from
saying that "XML" is the solution. XML is a tool. Good content
organization, layout, and functionality, also known as "instructional
design", is the solution.

What is broken in eLearning implementation?

2007-09-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

I see that eLearning and CBT are earning a bad reputation, not because the approach is fundamentally flawed, but because the implementations have catered to the lowest common denominator. This breaks down into two major parts, both of which are fundamentally driven by the customer desire for quick fixes.

1. LMS side: Customers want an LMS that shows the training department has enterprise-level clout. Beyond that, the customers are only now starting to think about what the user experience (operational concept) will be and what, if any, detailed reporting and tracking is needed. 95% of the LMSs I have seen only provide a report of who has completed the course. There is no consideration of tracking how many times an individual answered a particular question. This kind of tracking is very important to discover if there is a problem with the question or content or to see if students are just guessing at answers to get the "completion certificate". Many LMSs have been happy to provide this minimal set of back-end capabilities while focusing on the pretty front-end "virtual campus" interface (and on a strong sales department). This results in systems costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars that provide empire building but little else.

2. Course Authoring: If your course consists of converted PowerPoint slides with a single final test at the end, chances are your students will skip over the slides, take the test, and be done with it, without actually learning anything or proving that they know the content. Generally, presentation slides require a live instructor to complete the content and ensure that the students spend the time on the material. If you take away the instructor, presentation slides provide maybe 20% of the training. Visual animations such as flying bullets only add distraction; but that is what many course authors are including because, "gee, look how cool this is!"

In order to use CBT/eLearning effectively, the course owner must follow the entire sequence that the students experience. This means designing the course to match the delivery environment, providing multiple expositions of the same material, asking test questions on the same material multiple times in the session (and requiring completion of the multiple tests), and most importantly, reviewing the results of the training by seeing how each question was answered. Otherwise, it is like a high school that hands out the textbooks at the beginning of the year, and just looks at the scores from a self-administered test after the student has "graduated". "Quick and easy" solutions will lead, in the long term to a backlash against eLearning. Throwing new technologies (podcasts, wikis, game shows, and blogs) will not solve the problem if the content and approach are not sound, well thought out, and properly monitored.

Views on video in eLearning

2007-08-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

If the reader's objective is to tape face-to-face presentations, and then deliver these as "e-learning," I predicts that the reader will be disappointed with the outcome.

Although many people believe video to be 'active' and 'animated,' in reality it is an extremely passive form of training and results in very low knowledge retention. Furthermore, people can read and ingest information about three times more quickly than when hearing information in spoken format. This means that unless the presenter is attractive, professional and smooth, the viewers will quickly disengage. We have found that videos that last more than about two minutes are abandoned quickly; this is even true for YouTube.

If you want to offer employees self-paced training, I suggest that you create Web-like content in lieu of video. This means that the content has tables of contents so that students can establish their own navigation path that takes them to material of interest. This becomes very 'active' learning because the students are in control of the experience."

eLearning Slam

Making your courses a resource, not just a one time event.

CHALLENGE: How do you develop courses when you have a bandwidth limitation?

My latest rant on XML training

Tracking video's

My thoughts on course size

Creating mobile content

Getting the behavior you want, saving the data you need

How LMS's work?

What is the minimum requierment of SCORM?

Saving data in an AICC course

LMS/SCORM Complete status

More about ReadyGo LMS packs

ReadyGo's philosophy on course progress

Can my authoring tool support more then one behavior?

What does a SCORM LMS actually do?

What works when creating Web-Based Training

Including Surveys with Courses

Assuring security when giving tests

ReadyGo's web site

What I think about Avitars

Understanding the Differences between Mobile Platforms

Designing mobile eLearning courses

Why Mobile ELearning courses

Using Audio tracks for your eLearning

delivering content to mobile platforms

Course creators outside of the US

Choosing Authoring tools

How to Condense Training

XML - why do I keep hearing this?

Building courses fast

Cost justiyfing an LMS

Not my post - but worthwhile reading

Quick and dirty Office converters

About authoring tools

Fake SCORM limitations that mask LMS or authoring tool limitations

Getting courses out fast

My take on analysts and their reports

five thoughts on eLearning

Why use a web authoring tool for eLearning?

Why are people asking for XML?

Applying Classroom training to eLearning

Wouldn't it be great ...

Pop-ups within Training courses

Tips for creating effective content

Creating courses that work well on the web

advantages of eLearning

Where Wikis fit in

Creating a collaborative course development process

So what is wrong with the Next button?

PDA/Smartphone support for web courses

Randomizing test questions with SCORM

new terms for existing technologies

PENS - A better SCORM?

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

streaming class content ...why?

The power of online learning that most people miss

Getting video's to work in an eLearning course

FUN VS. DEVELOPMENT

Modularity and reuse

What to think about when deploying Web 2.0 technologies

Sco's and Print Paradigm

getting started - do you want to use Freeware?

Community Based eLearning

Synchronous vs Asynchronous training

a few things to think about for Synchronous training

Think about it - is online different then classroom

Thinking about SCORM

Outsource vs in-house

New technolgies and eLearning

Using ReadyGo to turn content SCORM Complient

Technology used to create web pages

LMS update - what they can can & can't do

SCORM and SCO's

My rebuttle from an online article

Building an effective learning community

TRAINING IN AN ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

Accessability (working with blind readers)

How to handle learners who don't like your course

Why turning your training into one big video is not a good idea